


To Wear it Like a Crown

by Laney_builds_cathedrals



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Angst basically, Eventual Happy Ending, F/F, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Institutional Abuse, Neuroatypicality, Reform School, Teacher-Student Relationship, Teenage Lexa, sort of...
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-10 07:32:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 41,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6945871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laney_builds_cathedrals/pseuds/Laney_builds_cathedrals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Struggling to find employment after graduating, Clarke Griffin accepts a summer job as an art teacher at a remote reform school for girls. When she begins to suspect that terrible things are happening behind the closed doors of the school, Clarke is torn between loyalty to her family and her growing devotion to one of the inmates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The 6 Minute Mile

She hadn’t seen her mother in eighteen months. Last summer they had spoken about Clarke coming to visit her at the school, but it was a long drive to a place Clarke had not particularly wanted to go to and in the end it hadn’t happened. Now, as she drove slowly along a narrow tarred road with dense forest on either side, she though that perhaps it would have been better to have seen the school before signing any kind of contract to work there. She had left the last town nearly half an hour ago and it had been a bleak one, barely kept alive by the income from a lumber mill on its outskirts which belched dirty smoke against the horizon. The only sign of life had been an old man smoking in the doorway of a liquor store and several stray dogs plagued by small, black clouds of flies. 

When Clarke had stopped at the gas station and bought a greasy-looking cup of coffee from the attached convenience store, the woman at the till had guessed immediately that she was going to what she called the ‘institution’. Clarke had been pleasantly surprised by this and while the woman scraped together her change, she had asked if the town had much business with the school.

“Not much,” the woman grunted, looking unhappy to be asked.

“Do you see the girls at all?”

Her expression soured further, “No. Unless a runaway comes through, which is only sometimes. They don’t often get this far, and never the same one twice.” She narrowed her eyes at Clarke, gave her change which was a quarter short and disappeared into a back room. 

Clarke had returned to her car without complaint, sipping cautiously at the coffee and feeling a sudden, sickening jolt of unease. Her sense of disquiet had only been growing since then, as she had left the town, taking a sharp right turn off of the freeway and onto the road she was on now. Her mother had explained that it would lead her through almost twenty-five miles of plantation forest before she reached the school grounds on the other side, a large property wedged between the mountains and the trees. 

After the first few miles on the new road the local radio station she had been listening to began to break up and crackle with static. She flipped around with the frequency for a while but couldn’t find an audible station and turned the radio off, rolling down her window to listen to the wind through the trees instead. It was late afternoon, warm but still fresh with the end of a long spring and the air rushing past smelled like pine needles and dust. In the quiet, Clarke found her mind turning to her mother, as it had been doing since the beginning of her trip. She thought again about what a reform school hundreds of miles away from her hometown could have to offer Abby. 

Her mother had never been especially fond of children, and certainly not teenagers. She had worked as a trauma surgeon for most of her career, after serving for several years as a hospital corpsman with the Marines, during which time she had been awarded a Commendation Medal. It had never surprised Clarke very much that her mother had performed well in the military: she was a stern, humorless kind of person, self-sacrificing and quick-thinking, but not very affectionate. Ever since she had told Clarke that she was inexplicably leaving her previous job to become the resident doctor at a private juvenile detention facility, Clarke had wondered whether it was grief that had incited the decision. Perhaps the loss of Clarke’s father had driven Abby back to something she knew intimately and still thought of fondly: militaristic discipline. Clarke recalled their phone conversation the previous summer, and the new, eager energy she had heard in Abby’s voice when she had described the school to her.

“It’s a good institution,” she had said, “You would call it a bit tough, I suppose, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing for these kids. No one’s ever given them any boundaries before, or consequences if they cross them. But they learn fast here.”

“I’m sure,” Clarke had replied, rather dryly. She had grown up listening to her mother’s rigid definition of discipline: boundaries, consequences, accountability. Without her father’s frequent intervention, she wasn’t sure she would have made it out of her childhood as unscathed as she had, and in the months after his death she had found some degree of comfort in the knowledge that she was old enough to no longer need his protection as desperately as she had when she was younger.

“You would like it out here,” Abby had continued, almost wistfully, “The trees are beautiful, and it’s so quiet. I worry about you in the city by yourself, spending so much time in that awful little café.”

“Mom…”

“You could be earning better money here, Clarke, and doing work more rewarding than waiting tables. The warden has been talking for weeks about starting an arts program for the summer. You could even coach some track if you felt like it.”

That had been the first time Abby had mentioned the job. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she said it would pay well, but Clarke had been enjoying her last, laid-back summer before her senior year in college and the money was not enough of an incentive to override the deep suspicion she had that the reform school was not an environment she would find healthy. But then she had graduated and spent months looking for work, discovering that the jokes one makes about being a Visual Arts major are less funny when one is suddenly twenty-three and decisively unemployed. She had eventually managed to sign a contract as a tattooist’s apprentice on the strength of her portfolio but the position would only be open from the beginning of October and she had yet to find a way to pay for it. Then her mother had phoned again and this year the offer had seemed almost too good to be true, a lingering thought which was now nagging at the back of her mind. But she had already agreed to a contract several weeks ago, one which she remembered with unease had included a confidentiality agreement she had signed without much thought at the time. So it was in spite of her mounting agitation that Clarke kept driving, as the day began to fade very slowly into a long twilight. 

She had come about twenty miles through the forest when the tarred road became a dirt track very suddenly. The deep shadow of the trees made the dirt indistinguishable from the tar until she hit the gravel at speed and punctured a tire. Pulling over into the thick shade beneath the trees, Clarke swore loudly at herself and her car and the road, but mostly at everything about this unsettling place that made her hackles rise. She slapped the steering wheel once, sharply, then turned off the engine and got out onto the road. Without the sound of the car, she could hear the coo of a mourning dove somewhere in the upper branches above her as she moved around, checking the tires. It was one at the back that had fared badly and she kicked at it lightly with the toe of her sneaker. She had a spare tire and a floor jack in the trunk, but had never used either of them and wasn’t sure she knew how to. It would be a better idea to call her mother and ask for help from the school, but there was no reception, even when she clambered up onto the roof of her little car and held the phone above her head. She was awkwardly dragging her jack out of the trunk when she heard the sound of shoes pounding against hard dirt and moved over to look around the body of the car. The road ahead rose up gently to the top of a low hill she could not see beyond, and as she watched, a girl crested the hill from the other side, then another and another until there were about twenty girls jogging down the road towards her. 

They were teenagers, dressed alike in gym shorts and a-shirts, running in slip-on canvas shoes. Clarke knew they saw her; she had felt their eyes on her from the moment they appeared ahead of her on the road, but they seemed indifferent: their faces blank and drawn. One by one they began to pass her by, first a tall, thin girl who had put a good twenty yards between herself and the others, then the rest in a quick succession of heavy-breathing, sweat-damp bodies. Clarke stood still and watched them go by, until the last girl came panting past. She was short and dark-haired, flushed from exertion. 

“Hey,” called Clarke, “Hey, excuse me?” The girl threw her a surprised, half-panicked glance but ran on without stopping. As the group reached the tarred road at the end of the dirt track they began to turn around and run back towards her, the gait of one or two now limping a little. Clarke realised with some disbelief that they had probably come all the way from the school and would run back, a ten mile round-trip. She was just about to call out again when she saw the leading girl look directly at her and slow down. The girls behind her caught up and overtook her, giving her quick, questioning looks on their way past, but she had broken away from the group entirely by then and was walking over to Clarke with her brow crinkled in a slight frown. When the last girl came by she slowed down too, walking backwards so she could keep Clarke and the other girl in sight.

“Commander…?” she asked, sounding worried. 

“Keep running,” said the other, who had stopped a few feet from Clarke.

“What are you doing? They’ll…”

“I said keep going, Blake.”

The girl, Blake, looked anxious and unhappy, her delicate features pinched with tiredness and concern, but she turned around and ran up the road towards the back of the group, where the last few girls were disappearing over the rise of the low hill. Clarke watched her go, then turned her attention back to the other girl, the tall one, the strong runner. She was perhaps about seventeen, a long-limbed, skinny adolescent. Clarke could see that her clothes fit badly, shorts and a-shirt both too large. The loose elastic of the waistband was slipping slightly over one narrow hip and Clarke wondered how she managed to run any substantial distance without having to hold them up. As if sensing Clarke’s eyes on her clothes, the girl hoisted the shorts up self-consciously, then thrust her hands into the pockets. When she spoke her voice was low and hoarsely shy: “Um… Do you need some help, maybe?” She gestured at the flat tire, “You… I mean… you have a puncture, ma’am.”

It was the first time anyone had ever addressed Clarke as ma’am, and she blinked at the girl for a moment then grinned suddenly, “Yeah. Yeah, I noticed, thanks.” 

The girl ducked her head embarrassedly and spoke to the ground, not looking into Clarke’s face, “I could change it for you, ma’am.”

“Really? That would be incredible. Honestly, I’m hopeless with cars.”

The girl only nodded at this, stepping past Clarke to pick up the jack that she had dropped onto the road earlier. As she put weight on her left foot, she winced a little and flicked a fleeting look at Clarke before reaching down and sliding her shoes off, putting them neatly off to one side. Clarke gave a soft hiss of surprise: the girl wasn’t wearing any socks and she could see smears of blood on her bare feet from several burst blisters and raw, painful-looking chaffing on both of her heels.

“Jesus, kid, hasn’t anyone ever told you about athletic tape? Or socks?” Clarke eyed one of her big toes, the nail of which was an ugly purple colour, “You’re going to lose that nail.”

The girl said nothing, getting down on one knee and sliding the jack underneath the car, squinting beneath it to find a good position. When she had, she slid the jack’s detachable handle into its joint and began to lever at it with firm, regular pumps. Clarke came over and crouched next to her to watch the jack being raised, noticing with some concern the way the girl tensed at her proximity.

“I guess you’re from the school,” she said, “From TonDC?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The jack met the underside of the car and the girl’s pumping became more cautious. 

“You probably know my mother, then. Abby Griffin - the school doctor?”

“Probably.”

Clarke smiled wryly, “Not a big talker, are you? That’s okay.” 

The girl let go off the jack and got up, dusting herself off. Clarke offered her a hand, “I’m Clarke.”

“Do you have a wrench?” said the girl, without shaking it. Clarke dropped her hand and went to get her lug wrench out of the trunk. 

Neither of them spoke again while the girl removed the hubcap and took off the lug nuts one by one with capable twists of the wrench. Clarke thought she looked like she had done this before, many times. She was going to break the silence to ask the girl’s name when she caught the sound of a motor in the distance, something rough like a motorcycle. The girl stopped what she was doing for a moment, her face expressionless as she listened to the sound, then she let out a long breath and hoisted the flat tire away from the body of the car, hauling it into the trunk and rolling the spare forward along the road with light pushes of her palms. It was as she was mounting it onto the hub that an ATV burst into sight over the rise, the sound of its engine suddenly heightened to a harsh roaring. It drew up close to them, slowing to a stop beside her car, and Clarke took in the man astride it. He was several years older than her, perhaps nearing thirty, and dressed in a black, faux-military uniform with a whistle on a lanyard around his neck. There was something disconcerting about his expression, and Clarke realised that it was familiar to her: the way certain kinds of gym teachers had looked when an overweight kid could not complete a requirement, full of anger and self-righteousness and a sadistic sort of pleasure.

“Woods!” he snapped, turning off his engine, “What the fuck is this, huh?”

The girl pushed the tyre properly into place and turned around to face him, head down. He climbed off the ATV and stood in front of her with his arms folded over his broad chest, his eyes moving from the girl, to Clarke, to the car that was still being held up at an awkward angle by the jack. 

“I don’t remember telling anyone they could stop running,” he said, “In fact, I think I made it very clear what would happen if anyone so much as stumbled this afternoon. So tell me, Woods, why there is a mile and a half between you and the rest of your goddamn platoon.”

Woods did not reply, still staring fixedly at the road, and when the man stepped towards her in a threatening way that Clarke immediately detested, she took a hurried step back. 

“She’s been helping me,” said Clarke quickly, struggling to keep her voice pleasant despite her unease, “I punctured a tire and you wouldn’t believe how stupid I am with cars. I would have been stuck here all night if she hadn’t offered to change it for me.” 

The man turned to look at her, unimpressed, “And you are?” 

“Clarke Griffin. I’m teaching the arts program this summer.”

His eyes narrowed and he pointed to the lug wrench lying on the road next to Clarke, “Who took the nuts off? You?” 

“I… No.”

“You gave a convicted delinquent a wrench?” His voice had taken on a quiet, jeering edge now and Clarke felt herself grow hot with anger and embarrassment. She said nothing but refused to look away and after a long, stubborn moment he turned back to the girl.

“Why are you still here? Move!” She took off like a startled rabbit, bolting down the road on bare feet. The man found her shoes and hurled them at her back, hard. 

“Put your goddamn shoes on, Woods! You’re not a fucking savage.” 

Woods snatched up her shoes but did not stop moving, hopping awkwardly from one foot to the other as she pulled them on. Then she was gone, sprinting over the hill and out of sight. The man watched her until she had disappeared, then faced Clarke again, his whole demeanor startlingly changed to something friendly and a little rueful. He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly and smiled at her.

“Sorry I had to come in with all guns blazing,” he said, “But you give these kids an inch and they take a mile. You’ll see for yourself.”

Clarke gave him a weak smile in return, “I suppose I will. She really was just helping me, though.”

“It doesn’t matter what she was doing. Her job is to listen to what she’s told and to do it, not decide for herself that something else is more important. We encourage absolute discipline here.”

“Hmm… That’s going to make my job a little difficult.”

He raised his eyebrows, “What?”

“Art. It doesn’t mix well with absolutes.”

“Oh,” he laughed in a way that sounded dismissive to Clarke, “I guess you’ll find a way.” He stepped forward and offered her his hand to shake, “I’m Roan Azgeda, by the way, the Correction Captain at the school.”

Clarke accepted the handshake cautiously and when he released her hand he was smiling broadly again, nodding to her car, “Shall I finish up for you? It’s getting dark.” She thanked him and he set to work, replacing the lug nuts with considerably more difficulty than Woods had taken them off, lowering the jack laboriously and loading it into the trunk. 

“We have a mechanic at the school who can patch your tire,” he said, slamming the lid of the trunk closed, “She’s real good at what she does, too good to be teaching shop classes out in the middle of nowhere, if you ask me. Listen, I think you’d better let me drive you the rest of the way. This road gets worse before it gets better.”

The offer took Clarke by surprise and she felt reluctant to accept it. Roan was being nothing but likable now, and yet she had bitterly resented his behavior towards the girl, who had seemed shy and sad and completely undeserving of his treatment of her. After a moment of deliberation her tiredness won out and she agreed simply to avoid an argument over it. He secured his ATV with a wheel lock and got into the driver’s seat, fastidiously clipping on his seat-belt. Clarke sat awkwardly in the passenger seat, picking at her cuticles and suffering through Roan’s cheery attempts at conversation. She watched the road ahead, waiting for them to catch up to Woods on her run back to the school. They had left only about fifteen minutes after the girl, but they had been driving for a good while before her silhouette appeared ahead of them on the road, her white a-shirt bright under the deep, twilight of the trees.

“God,” said Clarke, turning slightly in her seat to look at her as the car whipped past, “What’s her minute mile?” 

Roan made a smug noise in the back of his throat, “That one runs a solid six minute mile, quicker if she’s really pushed. She’s one of the best I’ve ever had, but lazy as hell.”

Clarke lent her forehead gently against the window to hide a frown, wondering if Roan thought most lazy girls offered to change tires for strangers. A few minutes later they passed the rest of the girls, some of whom were limping badly now. Roan blared the car horn at them as he came up behind them, making several jump violently. Then suddenly they had broken free of the forest and Clarke was confronted with a view of the school ahead of them, nestled in the foothills of the mountains: a large, plantation-style house facing the trees, with several smaller, white-washed buildings ranked neatly beside it. On the far right, standing alone between the far edge of a soccer field and the treeline, was a squat blue cottage with a low, tin-roofed outbuilding attached.

“Well,” said Roan with a small sigh, “Welcome to Ton Detention Center, Ms Griffin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from 'Cry No More' by Vaults.  
> You can find me at laney-builds-cathedrals.tumblr.com


	2. Offender 35

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Brief ableist language.

For a long time she listened to nothing but the slap of her shoes against the hard-packed dirt of the road. There was no other sound except her pulse drumming in her ears. The rawness on the backs of her heels burned insistently but she kept her pace, feeling the soft tickle of a bead of blood slip down under one heel. It would stain the rough cream-coloured canvas of the shoe, but the insides of both shoes were already a dirty pink at the toe and heel from previous runs; a little more blood would only darken the colour. Thinking of her feet broke the blankness her mind had begun to settle into and the blonde woman’s voice spoke softly in her ears: _haven’t you ever heard of athletic tape? Jesus, kid… Jesus, kid… Or socks?_

It wasn’t unkind, Lexa knew what to do with unkind. Cruelty was never hard to discern and she had grown very good at finding even the suggestion of anger in a voice. It was chiding, perhaps that was the right word, and achingly familiar. Anya had sounded like that after every match, unwinding the hand wraps quickly and carefully, brushing long, thin fingers over bruised knuckles. Then came the hand, mussing her sweaty hair, fisting gently and giving a small shake: _What, Ali? Still don’t know when to get your hands up?_ It was always the same, match after match, until the last one. Lexa’s mind recoiled from that thought with the practiced twist of a pole-vaulter narrowly avoiding the crossbar and found instead another tender rebuke: her father, standing in Anya’s dorm room, dressed in a clean shirt and tie. His dark eyes are on the split in her left eyebrow that has been sutured and the shiny purple bruise. _Christ, Alex, how do you make me so mad? Hell, I never meant to get you in the face_ ; then Anya suddenly in the doorway, as terrible and beautiful as an armoured angel in stained glass, telling him to get the fuck out before she calls campus security. _She needed stitches, you son of a bitch. She had a concussion_.

The little red Volkswagen passed Lexa in a rush of dust and bright headlights. She caught a glimpse of blonde hair on the passenger side, and a millisecond of wide blue eyes gazing back at her. The Captain was driving, she could see his bulky outline through the receding rear window, hunched over the wheel to keep his head from knocking against the roof of the car. She watched them disappear around a bend in the track, then stopped running abruptly. Although she was not badly out of breath, she leant over with her hands grasping her bare knees, to breathe deeply and think quickly. If the Captain was driving then his ATV was still standing where he had left it on the side of the road. It would be locked but Lexa knew how to break a wheel lock with a big enough stone and some patience. She half turned around and stopped again, every muscle tensed so tightly that she could feel herself shaking all over from the strain of the decision she was trying to make.

A very light rain began to fall, pin-prick droplets of water dampening her a-shirt and clinging to the fine hair of her arms. “Go back,” said the part of her mind that still thought of escape at every free moment, but particularly at nightfall, “Break the lock. Ride the ATV to town. Abandon it. Hitchhike across state. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.” But underneath this thought was another one, derisive and certain: “Try. Fail. Be brought back. Be punished. Try again. Fail again.” A car horn shrieked somewhere ahead and Lexa’s nerve snapped.

With a jolt she began to run again, faster than before and acutely aware of every step that brought her back to the school, to the Captain, to the Warden, to this new blonde woman of whose intentions she could not be sure. She knew that she was alone, that no one could have guessed what she had debated doing for those brief seconds, yet nevertheless a terrible dread of the repercussions wracked her. It angered her, that she had become so cowed that even the thought of punishment could make her physically ill with apprehension. When she was younger, before prison, very little had scared her. Anya had despaired sometimes, that not even the threat of a broken nose, or a knock-out, would make her more cautious in the ring. _You box like you’re playing ‘mercy’: no strategy, just brute endurance. It might work in these chicken-shit little high school tournaments, but it’s not the sport, Lex_.

The rain was settling the dust, making the evening air crisp and clean in her nostrils and chest. She could smell the moist earth and the herby scent of the wet forest on either side. At one point a squirrel dashed across the road in front of her, gone almost too quickly to recognise what it was. Lexa ran on, muscles screaming at each tautening and subsequent release. When she emerged from the forest and saw the lights of the school blazing ahead of her in the semi-dark, the regret caught up to her and swept through her body like a stomach cramp. “Coward,” she thought viciously with every stride, “You coward.”

Suddenly she was approaching the tail-end of her platoon, who were moving very slowly now, and the sight of them was enough to quiet her mind, like a cold compress on a fresh burn. If she had gone, they would have suffered. Whether she got away or she was caught, they would suffer. That was the only certainty, and the best reason not to have gone. Her shoulders relaxed and she fell in beside Octavia, who was still at the very back of the group, her breathing sounding pained and guttural. She would need her inhaler desperately soon.

“How go things?” asked Lexa quietly, making Octavia startle and peer at her through the dark.

“I’m alive.” Her voice was raw from breathing through her mouth for the last two miles.

“That’s all that really matters.” Octavia found the energy and breath to give a small snort.

They passed the entrance to the school grounds, which was unfenced and gate-less, marked only by two signs. The larger one was official and read ‘Ton Detention Center’ in tall black letters, with the mandatory safety disclaimer and a plethora of banned items listed beneath it: no fire-arms, no knives, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no narcotics, no cellular devices. The smaller sign to the right was more unsettling, a plank board painted with the words ‘Warning: You are entering a secured juvenile correctional facility. Trespassers will be shot on sight. Survivors will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law’. There was a dog’s head stenciled in below the message, an Alsatian-type in mid-bark. Lexa had never thought she could bring herself to hate dogs before she came to the school, but her first escape attempt had made her wonder if she would ever be able to look at them in the same way again, to focus on a dog’s smile instead of its teeth.

As they jogged up the track towards the house and the barracks, Lexa comforted herself by turning her gaze from the threatening shape of the house and looking to her right across the multi-purpose sports field to the blue cottage and the workshop at the edge of the forest. The lights were on in the cottage, which meant Ms Reyes had left the workshop for the night. Lexa imagined her limping around the little kitchen, making dinner for herself, still filthy with motor oil but hungry enough not to be bothered with a shower. She was probably smoking a cigarette, keeping it clenched between her lips while she poked at whatever she was frying haphazardly on the stove. With a flood of warmth, Lexa remembered the night last year when Ms Reyes had sat her down at the worn kitchen table, given her a blanket and made her a plate of food at that stove. She hadn’t said anything except “Tell me how you like your eggs”, but the next day she had gotten into a flaming argument with the Captain and Lexa had had the horrible suspicion that Ms Reyes would finally do what she was always threatening to do and leave the school for good, but she hadn’t. She kept living in her run-down cottage, teaching auto-shop and advanced physics, and only forcing herself across to the school when she wanted to pick a fight with one of the officers. Once Lexa had asked playfully why she didn’t eat her meals at the refectory with everybody else, and Ms Reyes had replied with absolute solemnity that any length of time in the refectory, eating institutional food and sitting next to fascists, made her realise exactly what kind of a shithole she had allowed herself to become associated with.

Lexa’s thoughts were interrupted by the sight of the red Volkswagen pulling up to the cottage, and the Captain climbing out of it with the new woman. She could just make them out by the light of the un-curtained cottage windows and as they slammed the car doors closed, the shadowy figure of Ms Reyes appeared in the doorway, framed against the light. Lexa saw with some surprise that the woman, Clarke, was pulling a suitcase out of the trunk.

“Blake,” said Lexa, “look over there.”

Octavia did not turn her head, her eyes fixed on the ground and her feet, “What?”

“I think Ms Reyes has a new house-mate – that woman with a flat tyre.”

She pulled a face, forcing words out between raw breaths, “What is she…huh… here for?”

“She’s teaching the summer extracurricular. Last year we had a sewing program, before you came. It was wild.”

Lexa gave a small smile when Octavia laughed weakly and mumbled something about trying not to imagine Lexa with a crotchet hook. That was something she admired greatly in Octavia, a practically undying sense of humour. Even now, when she was probably faint with an approaching asthma attack, exhausted and miserable, she could find pleasure in the weakest of jokes. In fact, she was still laughing very softly as they reached the barracks, where the rest of the platoon was standing dejectedly in the rain, grim-faced. The younger Azgeda was trying to corral them into formation, hauling up girls who were trying to sit down by the back of their a-shirts. She was the Captains first cousin, Officer Ontari Azgeda, a severely attractive figure in her black uniform, her hair pulled back in an impeccable bun. She reached out disgustedly and slapped a girl sharply on the back of the head for a muttered curse, then gave a piercing blow on her whistle.

“Get in line, ladies, you’re already late for dinner. If you’re not at the refectory in two minutes you won’t eat.”

Lexa and Octavia joined the back of the column, a formation that had become so familiar to Lexa over the past two years that she worried sometimes that she wouldn’t be able to function in the outside world without looking for the girl beside her, the two in front, the two behind. Octavia began to bend over as she walked, with a hand on her abdomen, maybe ready to throw up, but Lexa took her gently by the elbow and pulled her upright again.

“Don’t double up,” she whispered quickly, “Stay straight, shoulders open. Take deep breaths.”

Octavia tried valiantly for the hundred meters between the barracks and the squat refectory building behind them, until they reached the steps down to the sunken cafeteria and the smell of the boiled cabbage. She lunged suddenly to the side and dry heaved, leaning against the old stones of the refectory wall. Lexa came over and rested a light hand between her shoulder blades. She was about to say something when Officer Azgeda grabbed her by the ear and pulled her painfully away.

“Blake,” she snapped, digging her thumbnail into the tender spot behind Lexa’s ear, “Pull yourself together.” She gave Lexa a shake that made her hiss and tilt her head awkwardly to relieve the discomfort in her ear, “You’re coming with me, Woods. I heard we need to have a conversation.”

Azgeda pushed Octavia down the steps into the ugly florescent light of the refectory, silent except for the soft scrape of plastic cutlery, and closed the door with the hand that was not still holding onto Lexa. Then she released her with a parting cuff and told her to walk ahead of her with her hands on her head. 

“Where are we going?”

Azgeda let the question hang for an awful moment, then said, “Back to the barracks. Let’s go, 35.”

There was a particular way that Azgeda used her offender number, a note in her voice that told Lexa that she remembered very clearly how much Lexa had hated being addressed by number when she first came to the school. For the initial few weeks that was all an inmate was called and Lexa had made a point of not responding to it, until the Captain had run out of patience and yanked her out of bed in the early hours of the morning to have their first conversation about discipline. Lexa shivered now, walking back to her barracks building in the drizzle, brooding on what the tone of this particular conversation would be.

When they reached Barracks Building 3, Azgeda unlocked the door and let them into the pitch dark of the dormitory, flicking the lights on and standing in the doorway while the florescent tubes stuttered and came on. The row of low, precisely-made metal bunk-beds cast very little shadow in the harsh lights and the blue metal lockers against the opposite wall seemed incredibly bright surrounded by the grey of the concrete walls and floor and the coarse woolen blankets. Lexa asked permission to lower her arms, was granted it tersely and bent to take off her shoes, leaving them neatly near the door as was regulation. Then Azgeda told her to get her arms up again and marched her down the length of the room to what they called the ‘head’, a separate, damp-smelling room with showers and toilet cubicles, separated from the dormitory by a yellow plastic curtain hanging in the doorway.

“You have a good heart, 35,” said Azgeda, “A real good heart: stopping to help strange women on the side of the road.” She turned one of the faucets to cold, “I guess it didn’t hurt that she’s a pretty little shit.” She shoved Lexa forward, fully-dressed, under the hard fall of cold water and all the breath left her at once as it soaked her.

It took huge effort not to lower her hands from the back of her head and wrap them around herself, to shield her vulnerable torso from the blast of water that came pummeling out of the shower head.

“You think I don’t know what gets you all hot and bothered, Woods?” asked Azgeda with a small, pitying smile, standing slightly back from the shower and speaking loudly over the water, “Maybe a cold shower will help you keep it in your fucking pants.”

Lexa’s control slipped and she let her hands fall to her sides. She did not have time to realize her mistake before she felt Azgeda’s body tackle into her, ramming her around and face-first into the tiled wall with a fist pressed into the small of her back and a heavy forearm against the nape of her neck. She could not breathe through her nose because her face was being driven too firmly up against the wall. Her whole body ached, sandwiched as it was between cold tile and Azgeda’s unforgiving weight.

“Threatening behavior towards a CO,” said Azgeda near her ear, before hauling her away from the wall and turning off the shower, which had drenched her now too, “One step towards me and I would have called it attempted assault, and we both know how that would look on your record.” She dragged Lexa back into the dormitory, dripping, and over to the locker she shared with Octavia.

“Get dressed.”

Lexa did as she was told, changing out of her wet gym clothes and into the regulation uniform, a white undershirt and a dark green khaki jumpsuit. She felt the woman’s eyes on her bare back and dressed hurriedly, pressing the studs together with quick, cold fingers. When she had finished, Azgeda took zip-tie cuffs out of her belt and restrained Lexa’s hands behind her back. Then she gestured to the bare piece of wall beside the dormitory door, “You can sit in time-out until lights-out and think about your impulse-control. Be grateful it’s not a four-piece suit.”

As soon as she had got Lexa seated cross-legged on the floor with her back against the wall, Azgeda left the barracks, unclipping her radio and muttering something into it on her way out. Lexa let out a long breath and lent her head back. She was hungry and still shivery from the long run and the cold shower, but she was not angry or resentful. Those kinds of emotions had fallen away after her first year here. The only things that mattered were what she had done wrong and what she could do better in future, to avoid suffering these consequences again. So what had been her mistakes?

Lexa knocked her head gently against the wall and stroked her awkwardly-positioned fingers against the material of the jumpsuit rhythmically, pressing against the looseness to feel the last few bumps of her spine. When she was much younger, in 3rd grade, her teacher had called her father in for a parent-teacher conference and spoken to him about the autism spectrum, particularly repetitive behaviors. He was a high school teacher himself and had realized very quickly what she was suggesting, not that he had ever really done anything about her suspicions. Nevertheless, that had become his go-to reason why Lexa should ‘stop fucking doing that’ whenever one of her habits was irritating him, or she was talking too excitedly about an interest he thought particularly odd. _It’s like you want people to think there’s something wrong with you. You’re not autistic, Alex, but Christ you act like it sometimes_. She had become good at suppressing those kinds of urges and in high school none of the teachers seemed worried about her behavior, although she supposed that could have been because she was at the same school her father taught at and he was a man not even other adults wanted to fuck with. Then she had been arrested and things had devolved quite quickly. There didn’t seem to be a good enough reason not to do something comforting, even if it looked strange to other people. Sometimes, on her more compulsive days, the Captain called her ‘the spastic’, but Lexa found that she didn’t care.

Somewhere along the tangled trails of her thoughts, when she had almost fallen asleep, an image of the blonde woman leapt up in her mind, Clarke Griffin. It was a safe name: Lexa admired the almost-symmetry of her surname, the _if/fi_ at its centre: a good heart. She realized suddenly that she had been echoing that one phrase in her mind for a long time, feeling something like a ringing in her ears whenever she thought of it. _Jesus, kid, haven’t you ever heard of athletic tape?_ Yet still, underneath it, like the dull bass in a dark club, sounded the constant beat of her heart, a never-ending telegram: Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Stop.


	3. Space Cadet

The woman she was supposed to be living with was not especially friendly. She stood silently in the doorway of her cottage, smoking a long, thin cigarette while Clarke got her luggage out of the car: a slight, dark young woman perhaps three or four years older than her. A red, floral-patterned apron was tied loosely over her dirty overalls and she had a long smear of what looked like motor oil on her forehead. When Roan gave Clarke back her car keys and asked if she wanted to eat dinner at the school refectory, the woman made an odd sound deep in her chest and gave Clarke a very slight shake of the head. She blew an impressive stream of smoke out of the corner of her mouth and said coolly to no one in particular, “I’m making a burrito skillet.”

Roan raised his eyebrows at her, then shrugged rather stiffly and went striding off across the sports field without saying goodbye to either of them. The woman in the doorway kept her eyes fixed on his back as he walked towards the school, where Clarke thought she could see the dim, lurching shapes of the girls she had met on the road, moving like little shadows across the looming silhouette of the plantation house. Once he had disappeared behind the first of the school buildings, the woman turned her disinterested gaze on Clarke. Her eyes were a very dark brown and although they were difficult to read, Clarke thought she could see slight crinkles at their corners, as if from a frequent, squinting smile.

“My only rule,” she said, “Is that that man never sets foot in this house. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The woman finished her cigarette and flicked the butt into an empty flower pot that looked like it had been placed outside the door for that purpose. “Get inside, then. It’s raining.”

Clarke followed her into the cottage’s tiny kitchen, with an old wood-burning stove hissing near the door, a little square table pushed against the far wall and a bulky Serval gas refrigerator in the corner. There was a paraffin lamp burning on the table and it filled the room with a warm, soft light that delighted Clarke more than anything else she had seen that day. It was the kind of light that made her want to stop everything else and sketch. She pulled her suitcase in over the doorstep and the woman gestured vaguely at a doorway on the left which led into a slightly larger living room with creaky wooden flooring. It was filled almost entirely by an ugly, mustard-yellow sofa in the centre of the room, facing a long, movable blackboard in a wheeled frame. There was a white cat curled up asleep on the sofa and seeing it there made Clarke breathe out a small, pleased sigh. “

Your room is the first door on the left,” called the woman from where she was standing at the stove, “Mine is the second, and the bathroom is the door at the end.”

Clarke carried her things into her room, dropping her suitcase onto the narrow twin bed. The springs groaned loudly and she made a half-hearted effort not to be immature about it. But she and Finn had parted ways several months ago and she had been very alone since then, so she supposed it wasn’t altogether surprising that the sound encouraged an embarrassing surge of something. At first it was quite pleasant to feel a small shiver of excitement after a long while of feeling almost nothing at all, and she sat down on the squeaky bed with its crocheted coverlet to appreciate it. Then, mortifyingly, she realized that the pleasing image which had laid hold of her mind was a remembered glimpse of skin, just visible between the hem of an a-shirt and the loose waistband of a pair of gym shorts. She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes, trying to banish the picture from her mind’s eye, even while a part of her longed to keep it there. The girl on the road had been pretty, although that seemed the wrong word to use for her. Handsome was perhaps more appropriate, beautiful in the way that young animals are: energy and ability captured in an endlessly capable, compact frame.

When Clarke had been in her freshman year of college she had gone out to a racetrack very early on a Friday morning to do an initial study of horses in motion for a Finals showcase. It had been misty on the track and the rocking shapes of the horses had moved through the cold, hazy morning like fish barely beneath the surface of dark water. There had been one in particular which caught her attention, a long-limbed colt whom Clarke had later come back to draw in better light. He had not just been beautiful; all the young racehorses were beautiful. In him she had seen a kind of consciousness that was both familiar and utterly alien to her: something in the tilt of his ears and the flare of his nostrils that had made her believe he found a savage, painful joy in the willingness of his body to work for him. Yet behind the exhilaration was a terrible, feverish energy that could not be contained and frightened even the horse himself. Clarke remembered watching him being mounted by one of the apprentice jockeys, and the way his eyes had rolled in a frenzy she was unable to understand. He had skittered sideways, snorting and throwing a small buck, and the jockey had struck him sharply on the shoulder with a riding crop. In that moment, Clarke thought that she could maybe grasp clumsily at what it was that the colt was feeling: unbearably trapped in its own body, which was both a delight to it, and an agony. That was the only way she could explain how the girl on the road was beautiful, and it was equally magnetic and unsettling.

“You look like you’ve had a long day,” said the woman, and Clarke sat up quickly to find her standing in her bedroom doorway.

“I have. 500 miles is no joke.”

She nodded and flashed Clarke a small smile which seemed slightly shy, “I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Raven Reyes, though I guess Captain Azgeda told you that.”

“He says you’re a great mechanic. He’s not sure why you stick around.”

Raven turned away with a snort, “He’d like nothing better than for me to fuck off, I’m sure. Come and have some dinner. You can tell me what you did to your car.”

Clarke followed her back into the kitchen, where the cat was sitting in front of the stove, its tail making lovely, smooth twitches against the varnished concrete of the floor. There was food already set out on the table: a good-looking burrito skillet, bread and butter.

“Should I offer you a beer?” asked Raven, opening the old fridge with a sly glance at Clarke, “I don’t even know if you’re old enough for one.”

“Oh, I’m legal.” Clarke sat down at the table and began buttering a slice of bread, “And I could certainly use one, though I thought there was a sign on the way in about alcohol…?”

Raven snapped open two cans of beer and handed one over, scowling a little, “I know what it says. The day I let one of these sadistic fucks tell me what’s immoral is the day I decide I really do need Jesus.”

Clarke took a long drink and picked up a fork, “That bad, huh?”

“Captain Azgeda made a good first impression?” Raven asked dryly with raised, impressive eyebrows and her mouth very full. She had sat down across from Clarke and was falling upon her own food like a polar bear recently out of hibernation, shoveling burrito into her mouth with a fork and only pausing to have a large bite of bread.

Clarke wrinkled her nose at a fleeting image of Roan and the girl who had changed her tire: his latent cruelty and her helpless, brave stoicism in reply. “Not really. There was some unpleasantness.”

Raven glanced up at her, chewed and swallowed, then sat back a bit and picked up her beer, “I see. About the car, I suppose.”

“Well, sort of. My tire got a puncture right where the tarmac turns to gravel. I thought I was really screwed, but some girls came along and one of them tried to give me hand. Roan wasn’t impressed.” Clarke suddenly felt very, very tired and she set her fork down so she could rub the two, parallel frown lines just above her nose, “He really laid into her, actually. She was helping me and he yelled at her like a dog, worse than I’ve ever seen anyone yell at a kid before.”

When she looked up again, Raven was watching her oddly, with a mixture of tenderness and a sort of bewildered contempt that startled Clarke. “What?”

Raven poked at her food, agitated and unhappy, “I was just wondering where the fuck you think you are.” The hostility in her voice was sharp and Clarke felt herself flushing badly, anger and embarrassment sending a strange, uneasy flood of warmth to her stomach.

“I know where I am. This is a school for-”

“No, you’re wrong. It’s a prison, princess.” She gave Clarke a bitter smile, finished her beer and got up to get another. She stood hunched in front of the open refrigerator for a long moment without looking back at Clarke, then spoke to her again, rather quietly: “Who was this girl whose day you ruined with your fucking flat tire?”

The change in tone had thrown Clarke off balance and she sat at the table mutely, reeling from the awful foreignness of it all, like a new sailor trying to find his balance on the deck of a plunging ship; she was on rough, unfamiliar seas. For all of her life she had been the kind of person other people had liked instinctively. She was perhaps naturally good at social interaction, at seeing the ways in which people respond to those around them: what they enjoy being told, what sounds they make when they are sincerely interested, who they admire and how admiration manifests itself. It had become a safe assumption that if she wanted to be on friendly terms with someone, the relationship would play out that way without much difficulty. Raven’s sharpness towards her now was harsh and unfamiliar, and to her horror, Clarke felt the faint prickling in her nose which meant she was close to crying. With a conscious effort she tried to pull herself together: she would not be brought to tears on the first night of her new job just because a greasy, foul-mouthed mechanic wanted to intimidate her.

She was preparing to give an angry reply when she realized that she did not remember the girl’s name. Her stomach lurched almost painfully and she felt worse than she had all day, even when Roan had been yelling. She let her mind dart from excuse to excuse like a freshly-caged little bird, smashing itself into the knowledge that she had done an inexcusable thing: to be the kind of person who remembers a pretty girl’s strip of exposed skin with an animal pleasure, but not her name.

“Hey,” said Raven, her voice much softer now and anxious at something she must have seen in Clarke’s expression, “Look, that was a pretty dick thing for me to say. Your puncture was no one’s fault, and there wasn’t any way you could know she’d get into neck-deep shit for helping you.”

Clarke glanced up at her, where she was standing beside the table, fidgeting awkwardly with the tab of her beer can. For the first time, she really looked at her and saw an exhausted, honest face, a body like a coiled spring; the way one hand seemed habitually placed flat against her right thigh and the slight tilt of her body when she stood still as it shifted weight to the left.

“I can be a bitch at night,” she admitted, sitting down again and cracking the beer open, “This place… my leg... When I wake up everything is manageable, but then the day just beats all the optimism out of me.”

“I know that feeling.”

Raven smiled gratefully, “Sure, sure. Yeah. You seem like an okay kid, Griffin. I shouldn’t have said those things.”

Clarke shook her head and took a drink from her own can, “No, you’re right about me. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“Bullshit. You have a minor in social work, I checked. That’s a lot more than I have and I’ve been doing this job for six years now.”

Clarke tried unsuccessfully to repress a grin at the idea of Raven looking her up online, and was about to say something teasing when there was a light knock at the door and Raven sighed heavily. “Yes? Who is it?”

The door opened and Clarke’s mother appeared in the doorway in a yellow raincoat, her hair in a damp plait hanging wetly over one shoulder. She had a torch in one hand and a first aid kit in the other.

“Dr G,” said Raven with what seemed like barely concealed delight, “I was wondering when you were going to grace us with your presence.” She gestured for Abby to come in, and she did, closing the door behind her but not taking off her coat, which was shimmery from the rain and pearled with raindrops. Clarke studied her mother as she moved to the spare seat at the table, remembering again how long it had been since they had seen each other.

The last time had been the Christmas after her father’s death and it had ended in a quiet, angry little argument which had somehow seemed much worse than any of the screaming, spitting rages they had launched at one another when Clarke was a teenager. Maybe it was because her father hadn’t been there to get between them and force some kind of ceasefire. There was also the guilt of knowing how much he had always hoped they would begin to reconcile their differences when Clarke left school. Abby seemed to be slightly nervous of her now, looking at her out of the corner of her eye, and Clarke was torn between a vicious sense of triumph and a deep sadness. She did not know how they had allowed their relationship to decay so badly, like a rope bridge that becomes more and more impassable as the seasons progress. Neither could she see how to mend it and that realization made her helpless and at the mercy of a wave of regret. Her father would have nudged her with his elbow and said that she should use this time at the school to work things out and she would have grumbled something about it being absence which makes the heart grow fonder, but eventually she would have nodded tersely and assured him that she would try. Thus, the thought came to Clarke that without her father, one of them was going to have to be the peacemaker, and it might as well be her.

“Hi mom. You’re out late.”

The relief in Abby’s face was painfully visible and Clarke felt sick with guilt for every ignored phone call and monosyllabic text message. It had been easy to cut herself off from her mother when she was hundreds of miles away, to shrug off any kind of sentimentality when she couldn’t see her sad, open face. It was nearly impossible now and Clarke was even closer to weeping than she had been when Raven was sneering at her. Maybe Abby was on the verge of tears too, because she bent under the table quickly to scoop up the cat, which had been winding around her legs since she had come in.

“It’s very good to see you, Clarke,” she said, still not making strong eye contact, but with such sincerity in her voice that Clarke knew it was because of an affectionate tentativeness and not any kind of resentment.

“Beer for you, Doc?” asked Raven, grinning mischievously as if she already knew what the answer would be.

“No, thank you, Raven. I’m on duty.”

“Really? Do tell,” Raven drummed her fingers hopefully on the table top, “Has the Captain managed to pepper spray himself?”

Abby sniffed in disapproval, which Clarke could tell was only half genuine, and ran a hand smoothly down the cat’s arching back. “Captain Azgeda was very well the last time I saw him. I’ll tell him you were concerned for his health.” She gave a small sigh and plucked absentmindedly at a bur in the cat’s coat, “One of your little favorites needed a shot of terbutaline. She had a bad asthma attack just after lights-out.”

Raven’s eyes narrowed and she began buttering another slice of bread a bit too vigorously, and Clarke wondered if it was a way to avoid going to the fridge for another beer. “Blake, I guess.” she said, her voice subdued, “You shouldn’t call them my favorites, Dr G. They’re just my students, and I don’t want them to be picked on for it.”

Abby nodded and glanced at Clarke, “Ms Reyes teaches AP math and science classes to a few of the girls here.” She smiled wryly, “She’s affectionately named them the Space Cadets.”

“I should have been clearer: I don’t want anyone who’s not me to pick on them.”

Clarke snorted, standing up to take her plate to the sink. She felt her mother’s eyes follow her closely and said hurriedly to appease the awkwardness between them, “Is she alright now, the girl who had the asthma attack?”

“It looks like it: she reacts well to terbutaline.” Abby looked over at Raven, “Of course, she wouldn’t need it if Captain Azgeda listened to my professional opinion and didn’t keep making her run long distances. I’ve already spoken to him about alternative disciplinary practices but clearly I didn’t get my point across. Has he always been this stubborn?”

“Always,” said Raven, clearing her own things from the table, “You would have loved him as a teenager. Hey - Stop it, Clarke, I’ll do the dishes. Why don’t you walk your mother back to the school? Pretty lady doctors shouldn’t have to stumble around the dark by themselves.”

Clarke’s mind raced, grasping for an excuse not to find herself alone with her mother, but then Abby put the cat down gently and said, “Don’t bother, Clarke, the weather’s awful. I only stopped by to see if you were settling in alright.”

“No, I don’t mind. Let’s go.” It had always been a knee-jerk reaction, to do whatever her mother said she didn’t have to.

Abby laughed softly, already pulling the hood of her raincoat up and fiddling with her torch, “I forbid you to come out in the rain. You look tired; go to bed, darling. We’ll speak more tomorrow.”

Again Clarke felt at war with herself as she simultaneously rebelled against the old endearment and basked in its warmth pathetically, just as the white cat had lent into her mother’s touch minutes before. It had been a long time, too long, since she had been with anyone who could be so familiarly affectionate. She shrugged and nodded, watching as her mother went striding out into the rain again, then batted Raven away from the sink so that she could finish the washing up.

“You cooked,” she said, when Raven protested, “It’s only fair.”

“Fine, I’m going to shower. I hope you like to wash in the mornings, because I have no intention of saving any hot water for you.”

She disappeared into the back of the cottage and left Clarke to meditate in the swirling of the soapy water and the thorough circles she wiped across the plates with a dish towel. By the time she had finished and blown out the paraffin lamp in the kitchen, she was in danger of falling asleep on her feet. She moved groggily through the cramped living room and into her bedroom, shutting the door and worrying momentarily about the fact that it didn’t lock. It was only after she had undressed and was pulling back the bed covers that she discovered a folded piece of paper placed carefully on top of her pillow, with a hasty note scratched on it in handwriting that could only be Raven’s:

_C_

_I forgot to tell you that you have a meeting with Mr Kane, the Academic Administrator, tomorrow at 08:30; you’ll find his office at the house. I’ve drawn a map on the back of this, but if you get lost ask for directions from anyone without a whistle. Good luck._

_PS. I think maybe things are a little tense between you and Dr G. I’m guessing it must seem like your ma’s lured you into this place that she should have known you’d hate, but I’ve seen her do a lot of good things for the kids here and my only guess is that she wants you with her because she trusts you to do the same. Take it or leave it, that’s just my humble opinion. God knows, I’m no one to judge anyone else’s mommy issues._

_PPS. The cat’s name is Félicette. Don’t blame me - she was named by the Commander of my Space Cadets._

_R_

Clarke flipped the note over and glanced briefly at the beautifully neat little map Raven had sketched out for her. Then she put the note on her bedside table and blew out the candle with a single breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long wait and many thanks for the comments and kudos.


	4. Ouroboros

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Referenced abuse and implied self-harm.

She was having a dream about a dog she had known as a child.

Anya had brought a puppy with her when she and her mother had first moved into Lexa’s house: some kind of golden retriever cross called Patrick. Lexa had been twelve and could never remember being as overwhelmed as when Anya had come striding through the front door of their funny little shot-gun house and dumped the puppy into her arms: his warm, wriggling body almost too big for her to hold. Her father had put down his coffee mug and looked over at Anya’s mother, who was carrying in the first stack of their cardboard boxes, and his tightened lips had made Lexa intensely anxious, even while the dog squirmed into her chest and stuck his cold nose under her chin. Anya’s mother had seen his face and laughed softly, setting the boxes on the kitchen counter and leaning down to kiss him on the cheek, slightly rough with grey stubble. She had told him that it was Anya’s dog, four months old and almost not a puppy anymore; house-trained and everything. This had been the time just after their parents had gotten engaged, and her father seemed shell-shocked by the whole thing but uncharacteristically generous towards Anya and her mother, so his face had relaxed when she kissed him and he had smiled tolerantly and even reached out to ruffle the dog’s ears.

“We had a Labrador growing up,” he had said, in a rare moment of reminiscence, “Nice dogs.”

Lexa had loved Patrick from the moment he had appeared in Anya’s arms, mostly because he was soft and gentle and loved her back unquestioningly, but also because he was Anya’s and Lexa loved Anya more than she had thought it was possible to love someone. They had shared a room for the eighteen months that they lived together: she and Anya and Patrick. Anya was seventeen and wasn’t at home very much, supposedly because she was a senior in high school and had a part-time job with an auto mechanic in town, though Lexa suspected that it had more to do with Anya’s feelings about her father.

On the nights when Anya would come home after midnight, Patrick would lie on Lexa’s bed, pressed against her back, until Anya climbed through the window and fell into her own twin bed. That was what Lexa was dreaming of now, that she was curled up under a coverlet with her nose to the wall and the warm shape of the dog breathing behind her. She was waiting for the scrape of Anya’s engineer boots on the wall beneath the window as she hoisted herself up, anticipating the comforting smell of cigarette smoke and motor oil that would drift into the room with her. Patrick shifted next to her and she tensed, hoping he hadn’t heard footsteps in the bedroom next door, where her father slept. Once Patrick had seized onto her father’s pant leg when he was hitting her and she had been terrified that he would kick him, but her father had only dragged him into another room by the collar and closed the door. He drew the line at hurting dumb animals.

“Lexa,” hissed a voice close to her ear and she startled, half falling out of the narrow bottom bunkbed before a hand steadied her gently. The body at her back had not been Patrick, but Octavia, who was whispering to her now in the semi-dark of the barracks.

“Lexa,” she said, “I love you, but you need to get into your own bed before Azgeda comes.”

The night before trickled slowly back to her as she clambered haphazardly onto the top bunk and rolled herself into the cold bed. She had been released from the zip-tie cuffs when the rest of the platoon came back from dinner and had been undressing for bed when Octavia had fallen over in front of their locker, gasping hideously and squeezing her hands against the tautness of her chest.

Azgeda had reluctantly radioed for Dr Griffin, who had arrived wet and angry, asking Lexa rapid-fire questions about the run. Then the worst of the attack had passed and Dr Griffin had tucked Octavia into bed, smoothing the sweaty hair away from her brow and thanking Lexa softly for looking after her. Lexa had lain on top of her blankets while the lights were turned off and the door locked, listening to the fierce whispering going on outside between the doctor and what sounded like the Captain. When the voices had faded away she had climbed down carefully and gotten into bed with Octavia, because she knew how frightened she was by the attacks and how much she hated being left in the dark, dreading another one in the night while everyone was asleep and help was out of reach.

“You don’t like being touched,” Octavia had whispered, her voice still slightly shaky, “What if I roll into you in the night?”

“It’s fine. Just don’t… don’t grab at me,” she had glanced at Octavia’s pale face in the dark, “I mean… unless you’re having another attack. Even then, try to poke me instead. I might hurt you accidentally if you grab me and I don’t remember it’s you.”

Octavia had nodded and curled up in a ball on the edge of the bed, her breathing evening out quickly as she fell asleep. Lexa lay rigidly beside her, wanting to roll over onto her side but unwilling to let her back brush against Octavia’s body. She had resigned herself to sleeplessness but somehow it had crept up on her, after a day of work, and the run, and an hour in zip-tie cuffs.

_"Work hard,” Anya had written in the letter she had sent to Lexa soon after the sentencing, “Do as much work as they’ll let you do, whatever’s available. Then you’ll sleep well and the days will seem shorter. Who knows, Lexa? I keep telling myself this could be a good thing. No one will hit you there. Maybe you’ll get counselling. You can finish your high school diploma and maybe they’ll help you apply to college. You’re a smart kid. Take advantage of the next three years.”_

The door of the barracks building rattled and swung open, and Azgeda flicked all the lights on. Lexa breathed deeply, then extricated herself from the blankets and swung neatly off of the top bunk, trying to brace herself for the impact of the cold concrete against the bare soles of her feet.

The first day that Octavia had been at the school, she had forgotten to get out of bed on the left because of the panic that seized all the new girls when they were woken up by the screaming of whistles, and Lexa had jumped down on the right at exactly the same moment as she had scrambled up from the bottom bunk. It was as they were trying to untangle themselves from a heap on the floor that Octavia had learned one of what she called Lexa’s ‘berserk buttons’. She had gotten to her feet first and had bent over Lexa, who had hit her head sharply on the leg of the bunk bed when she had twisted in the air in a valiant attempt at avoiding Octavia, and put a hand just above her shoulder-blades, her fingers brushing exposed skin where the back of Lexa’s t-shirt collar had slipped down. A violent shiver had run through Lexa’s whole body and she had twisted away from the touch like it had burned her, rolling over onto her back and staring up at Octavia with wide, blank eyes. A trickle of blood had dripped slowly down the side of her face from a narrow cut on her temple.

“Don’t do that again.”

“I’m sorry. I forgot which side of the bed to…”

Lexa had shaken her head, getting up on her own and beginning to dress, ignoring the cut, “Don’t touch me like that again. Not when I can’t see it coming.”

To Octavia’s credit, she had nodded immediately, and promised solemnly not to touch her again. Lexa had liked her for that: being so unhesitatingly empathetic towards a complete stranger, even when you yourself are frightened and confused.

Now their routine was easy and automatic: Lexa got down on the right, Octavia got up on the left; Octavia used the locker first, while Lexa made her bed, then they swapped. By the time the whistle blew for Inspection, they were standing next to each other at the foot of the bed, fully-dressed and at Parade Rest. Azgeda stood beside the door and barked out their offender numbers, to which each girl responded. Then they got into formation and were marched to the refectory for breakfast. It was still quite dark outside, the sun just over the horizon, and the crunch of their feet on the gravel road to the refectory made Lexa’s mind jump from image to image.

_She was with the chain gang at the adult facility she had been in for four months before she was transferred to Ton DC. The work was voluntary (the advice in Anya’s letter still running through her head almost constantly), but she hated it so much that she thought anything else would be better, even the reform school. The loose gravel on the side of the highway made a particularly aggravating crackle as the gang’s heavy work boots moved over it and the chain had a metallic slithering sound that was nearly ceaseless, so that Lexa felt over-stimulated all the time, as if each new noise was another little black beetle scuttling across her mind, their tiny feet irritating countless nerve-endings. She was always on the edge of an episode, always thinking about hitting something, just lashing out at whatever was closest, particularly herself. The memory of a video clip she had seen once cycled on high speed: a pet snake in a bowl of water slowly eating itself from the tail up; too hot, too confused, its rogue metabolism sending it into a frenzy of hunger. Her uniform trapped the heat, sticking to her back with sweat and she could hardly focus on the weeds she was supposed to be pulling. Every now and then, a car would rush past them with a whoosh and sometimes a deafening hoot if the driver recognised their striped clothes. The other women in her gang, all at least eight years older, thought she was out of her mind._

She was in the refectory now, stirring her oatmeal reflexively with a plastic spoon, but her mind was still on the crunch of the gravel outside. Vaguely she could feel Octavia watching her from across the table with an expression she guessed was of familiar concern.

Lexa had had some trouble as a young child with facial expressions, not with her father because he was predictably unpredictable and she could get along simply by assuming he was in a dangerous mood no matter his expression, but when she tried the same approach at school her teachers were often alarmed or suspicious. She had to try much harder to understand what all the hundreds of different smiles and frowns and gestures meant, if only to avoid letters home to her father. Her teacher in third grade, who had realised this problem much faster than any of the others, had started sitting with her for half an hour every day and showing her a chart with rows of little brightly-coloured faces, each with its own exaggerated expression. Lexa had memorised them, which she realised now probably wasn’t the point, and that had gotten her through the rest of her years in school comfortably under the radar. She had also read extensively, enough to be able to guess quite accurately what other people were feeling just by understanding the context of the interaction and listening closely to the implications of what they were saying.

“Bad morning?” asked Octavia, although Lexa could barely hear her over the crunching of gravel, which she was struggling to understand was only a many-layered memory of sound that her mind was regurgitating all over the actual noises of the refectory: the soft squeak of chairs and sleepy whispering. There was no gravel. There was no gravel. _No one will hit you there_.

She gave the dismissive shrug that was one of the few gestures she trusted herself to make properly and Octavia’s expression deepened to something Lexa could not decipher, which only increased her agitation.

Octavia leant forward across the table and said, “Was it last night? I tried not to touch you at all, but I’m a restless sleeper, I know.”   

Lexa shook her head and tried to eat some of her oatmeal, to make Octavia stop worrying and sit back, but she didn’t.

“You should go to the infirmary,” she said, “Tell Dr Griffin you feel ill. Have you lost that toenail yet? You could use it as an excuse to go.”

“Leave me alone, Octavia.”

Azgeda walked past their table and rapped the metal surface sharply with her knuckles, so that Octavia closed her mouth and lent back quickly, and Lexa flinched away before she could control herself. Then the Captain was getting up from the staff table to make the morning announcements and give them their work assignments, wiping at his mouth with a paper napkin.

Lexa sunk low in her chair, giving up on the rest of her oatmeal and thinking again and again, as if in prayer: _Offender 35 – auto shop… Offender 35 – auto shop… Offender 35 – auto shop._ Everything would be alright if they just let her go to Ms Reyes’ workshop. She would slide under the 1972 Chevy c-20 on the creeper she liked and not have to see another face for the rest of the morning. Ms Reyes would understand: she would leave her completely alone or ask quietly, in the last twenty minutes of the shift, if Lexa wanted to sit on the yellow sofa for a while with the cat, which she did.   

“Offenders 23 to 30: report to the kitchen,” the Captain was reading from his clipboard in a bored drawl, and Lexa stared intently at her lap, waiting.

“Offenders 31 to 41: Summer Program in the school building,” he glanced up at them, “That means all of you, Third Platoon. Don’t let me hear any bad reports from the co-ordinator. The Summer Program is a privilege that can be revoked like _that_ ,” he slammed a hand down on the table in front of him, making the tin bowls and cups on it skitter over the surface.

Lexa watched him blankly, completely still except for one index finger digging its nail harder and harder into the cuticle of her thumb. Blood oozed up from the gouge it made and with enormous effort she stopped and tucked her thumb into her fist. She go up with the rest of her table and carried her tray to the hatch between the kitchen and the refectory, where one of the girls from Second Platoon took it from her, eying her dubiously when she snatched her paper napkin off of her tray at the last minute and wrapped it around her bleeding thumb.

After that they were marched across to the school building, a long row of old-fashioned classrooms built in the shadow of the Big House, and Lexa wondered uninterestedly what the program would be. During her time at the school there had been the disastrous sewing classes in her second year, and an orienteering and survival program in her first year that had been held as part of a charitable exercise by the local Girl Scout troop leaders. Lexa had enjoyed the orienteering a good deal, but it had been cancelled in the second week because that was when she had run away for the first time, while her platoon was trying to complete a compass navigation activity in the middle of the woods. She had gotten quite far that time, all the way to the highway and a little way down it towards Polis. It had been a good attempt, but it had not been worth the consequences and she had not tried again for a long time.

They filed into one of the classrooms and the first thing Lexa saw as she came in was Clarke Griffin, sitting a little awkwardly on top of the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. Her name was written on the blackboard in beautifully curving blue chalk letters and underlined with an elaborate swirl, as if she had been trying to kill time waiting for them to arrive. She smiled broadly at them all and when her eyes fell on Lexa, her expression seemed to falter a little, though what that meant Lexa couldn’t work up the energy to guess. She looked away hurriedly and kept her eyes on her hands, one loosely clasping the wrist of the other, as she and Octavia found a desk and sat down.

Clarke got up and spoke briefly with Azgeda in the classroom doorway, her smile unfaltering as she shook her head at something the other woman said. Lexa heard her assure Azgeda that they would be fine without her, that she thought it might be a more productive session if she left, and to Lexa’s great relief, Azgeda argued only for a moment before giving a dismissive gesture and disappearing back through the door, which Clarke closed with an air of pleased finality.

“Well,” she said, moving back to stand in front of them, her hands rested lightly on her hips, “Let’s get this show on the road, then.”

She picked up a stack of laminated cards from her desk and began handing them out, one to each of them. Lexa expected her to do it at random, but instead she paused at each desk and gave the girl sitting there a long look before flipping through the cards and pulling one out. As she got closer, Lexa realised that the cards were little copies of paintings, some that she knew and some that she didn’t. She saw Clarke hand out van Gogh’s ‘Wheat Field with Cypresses’, a Kahlo ‘Self Portrait’ and what looked like a Paul Signac before she got to Octavia, whom she gave Caravaggio’s ‘Boy Bitten by a Lizard’ with a small laugh. Then she turned to Lexa and almost managed to make eye-contact for a moment, before Lexa could dodge it.

She stared down at the scratched wooden desk surface, feeling Clarke’s eyes on her face like a physical warmth, heard the sound of her rifling through the cards. One of them was placed on the desk, blank side up, and Clarke tapped it with a thoughtful finger before withdrawing her hand. There was a name and an artist written in neat cursive on the top right-hand corner of the card: ‘Master Bedroom’ – Andrew Wyeth, 1965. Very slowly, Lexa flipped the card over and saw a watercolour painting of a dappled bedroom with shadowed walls and a little window, a bed at its centre, and on the bed a sleeping dog. Startled and suddenly, intensely thrilled, Lexa looked up into Clarke’s smiling face.          

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone is interested in learning more about chain gangs for female inmates, you can read a bit about it [here](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2166260/Americas-female-chain-gang-pictured-pulling-weeds-burying-unclaimed-bodies-100F-Arizona-desert.html).


	5. Windjammer

She stood in the empty classroom for a long time, wiping the chalkboard clean with slow strokes of the duster.

They had played hangman in the last ten minutes of the class, because Clarke had always found it a good ice-breaker, and the girls had still seemed more than a little stiff with her. It was hard to understand, because for a while things had been going very well. They had enjoyed the postcards she had given them with more enthusiasm than she had expected. When she had finished handing them out, she had held up the card she kept for herself, Raphael’s ‘Young Woman with Unicorn’, and told them a little about it and why she associated it with herself. Then she had asked them what they thought of their own cards and several hands had gone up immediately.

She was pleased to find that almost all of them liked their paintings and could talk about them coherently, even when she pressed them about use of colour and expression. The little dark-haired girl near the back was particularly keen and waved her hands around so much when she talked that at one point she accidentally flung her card right off her desk and made the others laugh. Clarke wished her friend had been as involved: the lean, solemn-looking girl who had gotten into trouble the day before. She had sat in her seat, very rigid compared to the little one, and hunched over the desk, running a thumb over the surface of her card. The only time she had met Clarke’s eyes was when she had been given the picture, and the brief glimpse of her dark, green gaze had filled Clarke with a sensation she was struggling to name; something like recognition but less familiar and more discomforting. The name tag pinned to the left breast of her uniform read ‘WOODS, A. 35’.

“Howdy, Princess,” said a voice from the classroom door, and Clarke turned her head to see Raven leaning against the doorjamb.

She was in her garage overalls, though she had half-unzipped them and tied the top half around her waist. The grease-stained t-shirt she wore underneath had a faded picture of the Shelby cobra on the front. As she smiled at Clarke and shifted her weight, Clarke was mildly surprised to notice that she was using a collapsible aluminium cane.

“Morning,” said Clarke, “Here for art classes?”

Raven snorted and limped over to a desk, slumping down into the chair and folding up her cane with a snap.

“I came to fetch you for lunch, before Roan tries getting you into the refectory again,” She took a long breath and sighed, “I always forget how far the walk is.”

Clarke hummed noncommittally and turned back to the board, wiping the last of the chalk off: the word ‘Monochromatic’, which had been the answer to their final game of hangman. That one had been interesting. She had chosen words and phrases that would gauge the group’s general knowledge of art and art history, making them progressively more difficult, and had not really expected them to guess the last one. Blake had offered ‘a’, which had not helped particularly, then Monroe had guessed ‘o’ and they had all sat, staring dubiously at ‘ __ o _ o _ _ _ o _ a _ _ __ ’ until Woods had cautiously put her hand up for the first time in two hours and said, “Monochromatic”.

Her voice was hoarse but clear and Clarke had beamed at her and asked her what it meant.

“An adjective, describing a work done in one colour, or different shades of the same colour.”

Clarke had pushed a little further, excited but wary of scaring her off, “Can you think of an example of a monochromatic piece?”

Woods had glanced at her very briefly, before looking fixedly back at the board, and Clarke had wondered if she’d gone too far, but then she had said, “Malevich. ‘White on White’.”

Now Clarke moved to her desk and started packing away her things, not looking up at Raven as she said, lightly, “That girl is in my class, the one who stopped to help me yesterday.”

“Oh? You never told me who she was.”

Clarke frowned and flicked through the cards she had asked the class to give back to her at the end of the morning, looking for the painting she had given the girl.

“Alexandra Woods, number 35. You know, I think she might have stolen one of my postcards.”

Raven got up stiffly and came across the room to Clarke’s desk, “Sorry, did you say Woods helped you?”

“I did,” Clarke slung her satchel over one shoulder, “It’s odd, I wouldn’t say she seems like the type to help strangers.”

She was startled when Raven looked momentarily fierce again, like she had the night before when she had snapped at Clarke over dinner. Then she seemed to get a hold of herself and her face softened. “No,” she said, slowly, “That’s exactly the kind of thing she would do. I’m not surprised Roan was such an asshole about it, either. He can’t stand her. Christ, what a clusterfuck.”

Clarke bit her lower lip, one hand fiddling with the clasp of her satchel, “I don’t know how to apologise without making things worse.”

Raven smiled a little at that and even reached out to pat her briefly and awkwardly on the shoulder before lurching off towards the door, “You should make her something to eat. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a kid as hungry as Lexa.”

They left the school building and Clarke fell easily into step with Raven’s slow, slightly rocking pace. After several minutes, she realised with some bemusement that they were not going back to the cottage, but in the opposite direction, along a rough path that wound up the gentle slope of the foothills behind the house. There was a rickety barbed wire fence about three hundred feet ahead and a rusted gate. Past the fence were several rows of low fruit trees that curved with the undulation of the hill they were climbing, and as Clarke got closer, ambling along unquestioningly beside Raven, she saw that it was an orchard of lemon trees. It looked largely untended, long grass and pretty white wild flowers growing between the rows, and the ground beneath the trees was scattered with fallen lemons left unharvested. A light breeze rushed past them and over the trees, making all the vivid leaves rustle and ripple like the waters of a shallow green lake. Raven was badly out of breath when they reached the gate, but she only paused for a moment to lean heavily against one of the fence posts before taking out an unwieldy ring of keys and unlocking the padlock.

“The orchard is mine,” she said, answering Clarke’s curious gaze with an unexpectedly shy kind of pride, “My mother left it to me when she died.”

“You grew up here?”

Raven pushed the gate open with a creak of old metal and threw Clarke a strange, calculating look, “I was born here,” she gestured off into the little valley below them, into which the orchard descended, “This all used to be a citrus farm, before the old warden bought it from my grandfather twenty years ago. He only kept this orchard; it was his favourite.”

They walked among the trees, Raven pushing down hard on her cane to reach up and pluck lemons with difficulty, until Clarke gently convinced her to start pointing out the high ones she wanted so that she could jump up and pull them down for her. They filled the small, stained pillowcase Raven had brought, then sat down in the grass in the shade of a row near the heart of the orchard. The smell of lemons and crushed, sun-warmed leaves was all around them and insects buzzed in the tall grass. Raven lay back with a small sigh of relief and Clarke felt a sudden, protective affection for her as she sat so close beside her with her back against the narrow trunk of a tree. For a long time they were silent and she thought Raven might have fallen asleep, until she turned to look at her face and saw that her eyes were open, gazing up at the blazingly blue sky above them through the lemon-laden branches of the trees. Clarke tugged aimlessly at a stalk of grass, warm and comfortable here but strangely restless, thinking over something that had been troubling her since the class.

“Raven,” she said finally, and heard the rustle of grass as she turned her head to look at her, “That girl: Woods. Is she… alright?”

Raven was quiet for a while, then she said, “Alright in the head, you mean.”

It wasn’t a question, and there was the slightest hint of coldness in her voice that made Clarke feel ashamed for asking, but she shrugged it off with effort. She had not asked out of any malicious intent.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”

Raven sighed and said, quietly, “That’s a complicated question. I’m honestly not sure how to answer it.”

There was another long silence, so long that Clarke thought she might not even try to give her a proper answer. Then she rolled over on her side, facing Clarke with her head resting on her hand and her bent elbow propped in the grass.

“Look… The problem with talking about Lexa is that it’s exceedingly difficult to know what parts are Lexa, and what parts are the things that have happened to Lexa. Do you follow?”

Clarke frowned, “Maybe.”

She found it difficult to pinpoint what it was about Lexa that had made her think that she was different from the other girls, and not just in the way that most shy, intellectual kids are different from their classmates. To begin with, there was something odd in the way she had held herself: stiff and careful in her movements, as if she didn’t want even her clothes to brush against her body. Clarke had wondered if it was some kind of hypersensitivity, like she had seen in one or two of the children she had worked with for her social work program in college. Then there had been the issue with the animal game, which had been the only other time Lexa had spoken in class before her unexpected interjection during hangman.

Clarke had been trying to learn everyone’s names, particularly since this was the group the Academic Administrator had suggested she spend most of her time with: the girls who would be leaving in the next year and needed a friendly face to discuss their options with. They were going around the room, each girl telling Clarke her name and how old she was, and then, to make it more interesting, what kind of animal she identified with. Things had been going well and the others had laughed again when Blake had said she would be a rhinoceros, but then Clarke had looked at Lexa, who seemed suddenly agitated, rubbing the back of her neck over and over. Her face had looked a little flushed too, as if she had just been exercising.

“Woods, Alexandra. Nineteen and three months.”

Clarke had smiled, even though Lexa was looking anywhere else but at her face, “Hey, Alex. What’s your animal?”

Lexa had flinched visibly and Blake had said, “She doesn’t like being called Alex.”

“Sorry, I’ll remember that. What’s your animal, Ms Woods?”

Lexa had rubbed her neck again and said, sounding hoarse and frustrated but also painfully apologetically, “I don’t understand the question.”

Clarke blinked once in surprise, then nodded, “That’s okay. What don’t you understand? I’ll be clearer.”

“I’m sorry. I… I don’t know what criteria you want me to use to choose this animal,” she had moved her hand from the back of her neck and begun to gesture as she talked, but then realised what she was doing and crossed her arms and tucked both hands under her arm pits, “I don’t think I’m like any animal in particular, because everything I am: the thinking, reasoning, reading part… that’s alien to animals. I… I think the only animal I’m like is a human being.”

Clarke had been quite shaken by the rawness of her voice, but had spoken to her gently, “I understand and it’s fine, don’t apologise. Do you have a favourite animal, maybe? Just one you like, I mean, for its appearance or something it does?”

The tension had left Lexa’s face like Clarke had been menacing her with a gun and had re-holstered it now. She had even attempted a small smile when she had sat back in her chair and said quietly, “I think the squid is under-appreciated.”

Raven rolled over onto her back again and shaded her eyes with one hand so that she could look up at the clouds that were beginning to appear like massive, billowy windjammers over the horizon. After a moment she said, “What I mean is that I think Lexa would have been a bit funny, even if she’d grown up with some well-off, kumbaya fucking family who only wanted the best for her. I think she’s maybe low-key on the spectrum,” She glanced at her to see if she understood, and when Clarke nodded she went on with a sigh, “But, like I said before, from the little I know of her life, it’s been… horrific. That makes it difficult to know what she would have been like without all the…” She ran a hand over her mouth as if pondering the right words, “Psychological scar-tissue. Am I making sense?”

“You’re crystal.”

Raven rubbed her face with her palms tiredly and sat up, groping around for her cane, “Good, then let’s go. It’s going to rain soon.”

Clarke picked up the sack of lemons and they climbed down the slope, out of the orchard and back towards the school grounds. She thought about Lexa, and the way she had stood in front of her the day before, her chest rising and falling in exertion: the mad, stupid kind of bravery it must have taken to make her stop running and approach a stranger to offer them help, even when it meant breaking rules and being punished. A part of her badly wanted to know what Raven seemed to have found out about Lexa’s life before the school, but another part really, honestly didn’t want to know, never wanted to know. Yet her mind skipped from thought to thought before she could stop it: phrases from some of the cases she had studied in college, photos, court transcripts.

They got back to the cottage just as the first drops of rain were starting to fall and Raven pointed to the sky with her free hand as she opened the door, quirking an eyebrow at Clarke, “Told you so.”

The cat was waiting for them in the kitchen and it followed Raven around, mewling, until she lit the wood stove and it settled down in front of it just as Clarke had seen it do the previous evening.

“She’s spoiled,” said Raven, affectionately, “As soon as there’s a little wet weather she gets impossible about that stove.”

When Clarke tried to give her the lemons, Raven smiled slyly and pushed the sack back into her arms, turning around to rummage through a cupboard.

“Lexa’s coming to work here this afternoon. She’s a prodigy with cars, I swear to God. So I’m making her a fucking sandwich, and you’re going to make the lemonade. I feel like you owe her a drink, and I’m all out of beer.”


	6. Misfire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Referenced abuse, self-harm and ableist language.

On her eighteenth birthday, Anya had brought home a tiny old portable television and hidden it in a shoebox under the dresser in their bedroom. She had only smiled crookedly when Lexa had asked her, awestruck, where she had got it, and put one narrow finger to her lips. They had to be very careful with it, because Lexa’s father forbade TV and the walls between the rooms were thin. On Sunday nights he went over to the geography teacher’s apartment to play poker, though, and would only come back in the early hours of the morning. Anya used to complain that there was never anything to watch on Sundays, but then one night Lexa had been flipping repetitively through the four channels they had and discovered reruns of a nature program that started just before midnight. She still remembered the first episode she had ever seen: a polar bear family in the arctic. It had been incredible, life-changing maybe, and Anya had had a hard time getting her to shut up about it over breakfast on Monday morning, when her father was always badly hungover and looking for an excuse to lose his temper. She had only been half successful, since Lexa had caught a beating anyway for knocking a mug of coffee into his lap in her excitement, but he had not been listening to her closely enough to find out about the TV and confiscate it. Despite Anya’s reservations, Lexa had convinced her to let her watch the program again the next week, and that was how it had become a regular thing: she and Anya in their dark bedroom, watching fuzzy, old-fashioned wildlife shows with the volume way down.

There had been a clip from an episode that had replayed in her mind over and over for weeks afterwards, and not with the warm, heady feeling she got when she thought about the bear cubs pouncing through a snowdrift. It was from the savannah episode, which she had been enjoying because of the lionesses, who were very cool and very dangerous. After a scene in which they had expertly hunted down a gazelle, there had been some long, picturesque shots of a waterhole at sunset, then a close-up of zebras drinking at the water’s edge, their delicate legs knee-deep in rich-coloured mud. A terrible sense of dread had crept into Lexa’s mind, and the certainty that one of the zebras was about to die horribly. The surface of the murky water had stirred slightly and she had bunched Anya’s coverlet so tightly in her fists that her knuckles turned chalky white. She had stared at the TV screen: the velvety muzzle of a zebra dipped into the water, its jaw working subtly as it drank. Then its nostrils had flared suddenly and too late its head had come up with a high-pitched bark of alarm. In the same second a crocodile had launched itself from the water and its lunging, bear-trap mouth had closed around soft flesh.  

That was how she thought of her bad days now, the ‘spastic’ days. They came unpredictably, hidden beneath the opaque parts of her mind, and the only warning was a cold, tingling dread. She had woken up that morning with it, and now it was reaching its peak, even as Octavia sat her down on a chair in the corner of the scullery while the rest of their platoon was washing dishes after lunch. Lexa closed her eyes and lent the back of her head against the wall, resisting the urge to slam it into the cool tiling until she woke herself up, until her brain did what she wanted it to do. Octavia came back with a damp cloth and held it to her forehead.

“I’m sick of telling you this, Lexa. You’re not well, you need to go to the infirmary.”

Lexa snatched the cloth from her with uncharacteristic violence and stood up, muttering something savagely under her breath.

“Sorry? I missed that,” said Octavia, watching her pick up a pile of trays and begin to wipe them down one by one.

“I said fuck off.”

Octavia held up her hands in a half-hearted gesture of surrender, and the look of bewildered anger and hurt on her face was clear enough that Lexa didn’t have to speculate.

“Jesus, alright then. Give me back my goddamn cloth, Woods, and do us all a favour and go fuck one of your precious cars.”

When Lexa stared at her blankly, her face softened slightly into what Lexa could only guess was an expression of renewed concern.

“They assigned you to Ms Reyes for the afternoon, Lexa. You didn’t hear the announcements?”

Lexa finished wiping the last tray and threw the cloth at Octavia so that it smacked wetly into the chest of her overalls, then turned around and went striding out of the scullery and through the empty refectory. She could hear Octavia muttering curses at her back and felt momentarily guilty. For a brief moment, an impulse to go back and apologise pierced the vail of anger and frustration that descended on her at times like this, the warning signs of what her third grade teacher had called ‘meltdowns’, but then the first of a bout of phantom pains hit her and it was all she could do to climb the steps out of the refectory and half-collapse against the wall outside, leaning her hands heavily against the bricks.

Everything was too much: the rain falling steadily down on the crown of her head and dripping behind one ear, the texture of the cheap polyester t-shirt she wore underneath the overalls. The sharp corners of its clothing tag tickled infuriatingly against the raw, pink skin on the nape of her neck, where she had been rubbing all morning. Worst of all were the pains, almost like burning, almost like electrical shocks, which shot through her back. A particularly violent one caught her off guard, blazing in a line from right shoulder blade to left hip and she rammed her face into the wall in front of her, mouthing airlessly like a fish reeled onto a beach in abject agony. The hidden little part of her mind that could still process anything prayed, fervently, that no one found her like this. Her episodes embarrassed her beyond bearing, and if the Captain saw her as she was now there would be prodding and shouting and he would not let her pretend that it had not happened, which was all she ever wanted to do.

“Feel like you’re going to spaz out today, Woods?” he would say for weeks afterwards, “Do we need to put you in restraints again?”   

Lexa reached up and slapped herself hard over the right ear, so that her head rang with the impact and she had to sit down heavily in the dirt. The slap had maybe steadied her a bit, though, and she did it again, three times. The realness of that pain was better than the false pain, which felt like a white-hot poker was being laid across her back.

“Liar,” she gasped to herself in a rush, between grit teeth, because she could not keep all her thoughts crammed and seething inside her head any longer, “It’s not a poker, it’s a garden hose. It feels like being-” She slapped herself a fifth time, and was getting ready to do it again when a hand caught her firmly by the wrist and stopped her.  She could smell aftershave and woodchips, and feel the coolness of a shadow blocking her from the direct sun as a figure leaned over her.

“Whoa, Lexa, whoa,” said a deep voice a little too close to her ear and she startled, peering up at a dark, pleasant face.

“Can I touch you, Lexa?” asked Lincoln and she hesitated for a long moment before she nodded slowly. He smiled at her and rested his free hand on her shoulder, still keeping her narrow wrist clasped gently in the other. With huge effort she moved her eyes over him, trying to catalogue every detail: the pattern of his lumberjack flannel, the way the elastic of his suspenders stretched as he crouched down next to her, the soft scuffing sound of his boots shifting in the grit.

He was only slightly older than her, although she always forgot because he was so much bigger: all broad shoulders and callused hands from his night job at the mill in Polis. The Captain had forbidden any of the girls from speaking to him and she had only ever seen him at a distance, mending rooves for his grandfather, who was the school groundskeeper, or helping Ms Reyes in the garage. It was strange to see him so close, and the strangeness of it seemed to yank her from the awful familiarity of the episode: less frenzied now, and more utterly exhausted.

“Should I take you to the infirmary?” he asked quietly, “I don’t want to rush you, but we’ll both be in trouble if someone sees us here.”

Lexa shook her head vehemently. She could remember being seen by a doctor exactly three times in her life: once when she had needed stitches after her father accidentally concussed her when she was fifteen, a second time after her last boxing match because the police thought her hands might be broken, and most recently after her second escape attempt. The smell of latex and disinfectant were irrationally terrifying, and she had been brought up knowing that doctors would make her undress, would touch her with gloved hands, would ask inherently dangerous questions to which she understood she had no acceptable answers. If she could make it through the last months of her sentence without ever being alone in a room with Dr Griffin again, it would be the kind of small mercy she felt the world maybe owed her at this point.

Lincoln frowned a little but then he nodded and said, “You want to go to Raven’s? I was going there anyway.”

“Yes, please.”

He looked down pointedly at the hand he was holding and only let go when Lexa glanced fleetingly, anxiously, at his face and muttered, “I’m done. I won’t do it again.”   

“Okay then.” He straightened up and offered her a hand but she ignored it, getting to her feet cautiously, waiting to see if the pains had ceased or if they were waiting to surprise her when she wasn’t expecting it. Lincoln waited for her as she took a deep breath, then gestured to his truck, which was parked on the track just before the turn-off that went down to Ms Reyes’ house. The driver’s door was still open and Lexa winced at the idea that he had seen her mid-episode in his mirrors and that it had seemed urgent enough for him to have gotten out of his car in a rush to help her. It felt too much like the first time she had had a meltdown in front of Anya: the terrible combination of being almost completely out of control, and simultaneously sickeningly ashamed, a feeling that only grew stronger when faced with concern or kindness.  

There was another, much nicer, car being towed behind Lincoln’s truck, and he jutted his chin at it proudly as he got into the driver’s side, leaning over the gear stick to pop the passenger door open for Lexa.

“That’s my foreman’s truck. The engine’s misfiring and he wants Raven to take a look. Great pick-up, right? It’s a Jeep J10.”

Lexa lent her head against the window and said, tiredly, “A 1978 Honcho, I know.”

She hadn’t been in a moving car much for the last three years, except for the prison bus that had brought her from state prison to the school, and she hadn’t been in the right state of mind to appreciate it then. The roar of Lincoln’s engine as it turned over was comforting, as well as the vibrations it sent through the window and against the bones of her face. She didn’t move her head from the window pane, even as they went jolting down the track, which got progressively rougher as it curved around the edge of the sports field.

Sometimes Lexa wondered if it was unhealthy that she got as much comfort as she did from anything she could trace back to Anya. Boxing and cars had been Anya’s great interests for as long as Lexa had known her and their room had had only two posters up on the walls: one of Laila Ali in the ring, and another of Michelle Rodriguez leaning on a muscle car. For the whole of her first year at the school, the only way Lexa had been able to fall asleep was to mentally take apart an engine and put it back together, or else recite boxing combinations under her breath.

As much as she needed memories of Anya to keep herself sane, there were times when even those were too painful to think about, full of self-loathing and regret. Anya had started working as a mechanic’s assistant for her uncle when she was fourteen, got a paying job at a garage at sixteen, and been thoroughly over-prepared for the degree she winged through at nineteen, majoring in automotive mechanics. The last time Lexa had seen her, when she visited her that one time in juvie before sentencing, she had just graduated and was toying with the idea of starting up an auto shop of her own with a classmate of hers from college. There had been the off-hand mention of a girlfriend, too, whom Lexa had guessed was a lot more serious than any of the string of girls Anya had had fun with all through high school and college, because of Anya’s unexpected shyness when asked anything about her. In short, Anya was living the kind of life Lexa had only ever been able to daydream about, and now she was convinced that was all she would ever be able to do.   

Lincoln pulled up outside Ms Reyes’ garage, and turned off the engine before turning slightly towards Lexa and saying, “How do you want to play this, buddy?”

Lexa stared at him warily, “How do I want to…? Nothing… I… I’m supposed to be working here. I’m a bit late but…”

“No, okay, that’s fine,” he held up his hands unthreateningly, “I was just wondering if I should tell Raven you’re not well.”    

“Please don’t.” She tried to open her door to scramble out, panicked a little when she realised it was locked, then heard the click as Lincoln pushed the mechanism that unlocked both doors.

“I won’t tell her anything you don’t want me to, Lexa,” he said as she slid out awkwardly, still cautious of her own body, “But listen – I don’t know you much at all, you know, but I know that Raven likes the hell out of you. She talks about you all the time. So, if you ever did want to tell her you’re not okay, I’m a hundred percent sure she wouldn’t think any differently about you. Yeah?”

Lexa paused, about to close the door behind her, tapping the toe of her sneaker lightly against the front tire. “Yeah. Thanks for the ride.”

“Any time. Hey, you think you could do something for me?”

Lexa raised her eyebrows at him and he smiled in a strange, embarrassed way and pulled a folded square of paper out of the breast pocket of his shirt, “Could you give this to Blake?”

The cottage door opened and Ms Reyes came out, leaning against the wall because she didn’t have her cane with her. Lexa took the note gingerly, then slammed the door closed and ducked into the garage, hoping she could get under a car before Ms Reyes tried to ask her anything she didn’t want to answer. She had managed to tuck the note into her left sneaker and was pulling a work smock on over her overalls when Raven stuck her head through the door and said, “Not so fast, Lexa. Go and have a seat in the kitchen, I’ll be there in two minutes.”

Lexa felt like sitting down right there, on the greasy concrete floor of the garage and never moving again, but instead she nodded and took the smock off, hanging it back on its hook behind Raven’s desk in the corner. When she came out of the garage, Lincoln was unhooking the Jeep from his own truck, talking animatedly to Raven about it.   

Raven saw her watching them and flapped her hands at her, “Go inside. I’m not arguing with you,” She paused for a moment then added, “I’m not angry with you either, Lexa, so don’t give me that kicked puppy look.”

Lexa gave her a tired smile instead and climbed the step stiffly into the cottage kitchen, which was empty except for Félicette, who was curled up in front of the stove. She bent over and picked the cat up, whispering a soft apology to her when she meowed in lazy protest.

Lexa had found her as a kitten in the woods, so muddy that it had been impossible to know that she was white until Raven had washed her twice with her own shampoo. That had been during the second escape attempt, when Lexa had avoided the road entirely and headed off through the forest in the general direction of Polis. She had been climbing over a log, praying ardently that she wouldn’t disturb one of the timber rattlesnakes that she had encountered in the forest frequently before, and over the noise of the rain and the rustle of a storm-bringing wind in the trees, she had heard desperate mewling coming from a tangle of exposed roots at the base of the log. As soon as she had found the kitten and had her cradled in her arms to protect her from the rain, she had known that she had to turn back to the school. It had been too late to return without anyone noticing her absence, though, and about half a mile from the school she had met the Captain’s search party and had two dogs set on her before she could try to explain anything. She had been bitten quite badly, just above the back of the knee, but only remembered a desperate need to keep the kitten away from the Captain’s Dobermans. Occasionally she still had nightmares in which she was lying flat on her stomach in the leaves, shielding the kitten beneath her body while dogs barked all around her and the bright beams of flashlights swung wildly against tree trunks and she couldn’t feel her left leg at all, just the sticky warmth of blood soaking into her trouser leg.

Raven had told her to sit in the kitchen, but the warmth of Félicette against her chest and the sheer exhaustion that always accompanied the end of an episode drew her into the sitting room and onto the yellow couch. She lay down on her back with the cat on her stomach and closed her eyes, listening to the sound of rain on the tin roof of the cottage and the shower running in the bathroom. Félicette had already fallen into a doze again, and her purring was the best thing that had happened to Lexa all day, except perhaps for the painting Clarke had given her, which Lexa still had in the back pocket of her overalls, wrapped carefully in paper napkins from the refectory.

When the noise of the shower stopped and the bathroom door opened a few minutes later, she was asleep enough not to care. Light footsteps moved around the room, and the sound of a cabinet door opening and shutting in the bathroom. Then the couch sunk a little as someone sat down close beside her head. Lexa’s usual instincts, to startle away, to flinch from possible contact, felt muted and at a distance. Even when a hand brushed loose strands of hair from her forehead, she could only bring herself to half open her eyes.

“Sorry,” said Clarke, “You have a little cut.” She gestured vaguely to her own right temple, and her blonde hair was still damp from the shower, her face soft in the afternoon sunlight coming in through the sitting room window.

“Oh.”

The hand came back, this time with a cotton swab, to dab at what Lexa guessed was the damage done by the refectory wall. She shifted slightly at the smell of disinfectant and Clarke paused.

“I can stop, if you’re uncomfortable.”                        

Lexa took a shallow breath and closed her eyes again. “No,” she said, “Don’t stop.”     

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the kudos and the comments. I appreciate them enormously.


	7. Savant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Referenced self-harm, ableist language

Lexa was the deepest sleeper Clarke thought she had ever seen: her limbs completely loose, her breaths long and even. Clarke sat very still next to her, afraid she would wake her if she shifted her weight too suddenly. She had cleaned the scrape on her forehead with iodine and put a band-aid on it, and because something about the gentle attention seemed to make Lexa relax slowly into the couch, she had left one hand resting lightly on her brow when she was finished. Her dark, crinkly hair was tied back in a loose, disorderly braid and several curls had escaped, which Clarke allowed her thumb to smooth over. Lexa didn’t stir and she slid her hand softly down to a little scar that cut neatly through her left eyebrow. She didn’t want to think about where the scar had come from, and she thought instead about how much Lexa reminded her of a sleepy puppy, collapsed in a pool of sunlight in the middle of the afternoon.

The kitchen door opened with a squeak of old hinges, and the sound of the drizzle outside became momentarily louder as Raven came in, shouting a brief farewell to the boy who had brought her a car to look at. Her voice was gruffly affectionate and when she appeared in the doorway of the sitting room there was still a small smile on her lips. It grew slightly when she saw Lexa asleep, although Clarke wondered if perhaps there was something sad in her eyes as she came over to perch on the arm of the couch. She reached out and stroked the cat once, from ears to tail, then put a hand on Lexa’s knee and glanced over at Clarke, “Her sleeping is irregular, at best, but once she’s down, she’s really down.”

“She looks very young when she’s asleep; young and tired, you know.”

Raven shrugged and stood up, leaning over Lexa and taking her shoes off smoothly, one by one. It reminded Clarke of the way she had taken care of hopelessly drunk friends in college: a rueful, frustrated act of love.

“That’s exactly what she is: very young, very tired.” She pulled a piece of paper out of one of Lexa’s shoes, seemed to consider unfolding it, but thought better of it and put the note carefully back into the shoe. When she looked up and saw Clarke watching her, she made a dismissive gesture and said, “I try not to mother her too much, she doesn’t like it. It’s just that the longer I know her, the more I think she needed a mother once, really badly, and didn’t get one.”

Clarke’s gaze shifted from Raven to Lexa, whose sleeping face was open and unguarded. There was another scar, just above the bridge of her nose and she brushed it with the tip of her index finger.  

“You care about her,” she said, and her own voice sounded strangely fierce to her, “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Raven hummed in vague agreement and sat down on the only other piece of furniture the little sitting room could contain, a weather-beaten old rocking chair. She stretched out her bad leg and rubbed both hands down its length, as if testing it for faults.

“Lexa wouldn’t agree with you,” she replied, almost absentmindedly, “Her understanding of love is… complicated. I suppose it’s a difficult thing to try to get your head around when most of the people who have claimed to love you have also hurt you, but particularly for Lexa.”

“Why particularly?”

She gave her leg a final, hard knead and lent back so that the chair creaked and began to rock slowly, “Because Lexa understands the world in patterns. It makes her wonderful at math. She applies them to everything, so when she considers the concept of love she looks back at her own experience and finds the pattern: whatever is repeated.”

Almost as if she could sense that they were talking about her, Lexa shifted in her sleep and Clarke lifted her hand from her hair quickly, feeling suddenly anxious that she would wake up and be embarrassed or angry at being touched. She quietened again after a moment, though, and Clarke had to resist the urge to replace her hand. Lexa’s hair was soft and thick; slightly wild, like it had only been hastily finger-combed and tied back for a long time.

There was the soft scrape and crackle of a match being lit and Clarke looked up to see Raven lighting one of her long cigarettes. She tucked the pack into a pocket and took a long, satisfied drag.

“I don’t want Lexa to know this yet,” she said, turning her head to exhale a stream of smoke away from them, “But I cared about her even before I met her.”

For a second, Clarke was utterly startled. It felt as though Raven had expressed in eight words the bewildering knot of emotions and impulses she had been feeling from the moment Lexa had appeared in front of her on the road, sweaty and shy: the jolt of intense familiarity for someone she had never met. Then she realised that Raven was smiling coyly, introspectively maybe, as if there was something Clarke didn’t know yet.

“It’s a long story, but I met someone in college, someone who knew Lexa. She told me a bunch of stories about her,” she laughed softly, “It took me long enough to realise who she was. I guess part of me didn’t want it to be her, this funny little kid I’d heard so much about.” She got up from the rocking chair and went into the kitchen, where Clarke could hear the hum of the fridge being opened and the clatter of plates. Félicette woke up languidly, briefly stretching out on Lexa’s chest before jumping down from the couch and padding off to the kitchen, already crying plaintively. Raven answered her softly, chidingly, then stuck her head around the doorway, speaking to Clarke around the cigarette clenched between her lips, “You want one of these sandwiches?”

“Please.”

She came back into the sitting room with the plate of sandwiches she had made earlier, which she thrust at Clarke, “Hold this while I wake her up, won’t you?”

Clarke took it from her and watched as Raven sat down on the edge of the couch and shook Lexa’s shoulder gently. Lexa made a small, reluctant noise in the back of her throat but didn’t open her eyes, and Raven laughed and shook her a little harder, “Come on, Lex. Up and at ‘em, tiger.”

Lexa flung a long arm over her face for a moment, like someone much younger, and her knuckles brushed accidentally against Clarke’s thigh. In an instant she was awake and scrambling into a sitting position on the other end of the couch, blushing furiously. Clarke thought it was lucky the cat had already climbed off of her, or Lexa would have sent her into a clawing panic.

“I’m sorry,” Lexa said, rubbing her eyes furiously, then blinking across at Clarke, “I forgot you were there.”

Clarke smiled at her, which only made her look more flustered, and told her not to apologise. When she held out the plate of sandwiches, Lexa shook her head embarrassedly and Raven stared at her in mock horror, “Goddamn. I never thought I’d see the day. Take one anyway, Lexa, you’ll be hungry later.”

Reluctantly, Lexa accepted a peanut butter sandwich, holding it awkwardly in one hand as Raven went back into the kitchen to fetch the lemonade. Clarke had to keep herself from laughing as Lexa stared down a bit grumpily at it, then took a cautious bite. She covered her mouth with her free hand as she chewed and glanced nervously at Clarke every now and then, until Clarke put the plate down on the couch between them and picked up a sandwich for herself. She folded her legs under her then, sinking back into the couch, still leaving a safe distance between them, and ate so quickly that she was already onto her second sandwich by the time Raven came back and put a glass of lemonade into her hand.

“Jesus, Lexa, no one’s going to take it away from you.”

Lexa looked mildly chagrined but only slowed down long enough to have a drink. Raven tousled her hair with a laugh and took a sandwich, sitting back down in the rocking chair. They ate in silence for a while, then Clarke cleared her throat and said, “You seem to know a bit about art, Lexa.”

Lexa swallowed carefully, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and said, “I… uh… studied it in school until I was sixteen.”

“That’s cool. Did you take visual arts for your high school diploma?” 

“No. I finished high school here and art isn’t offered. I did shop instead, with Ms Reyes.”

Raven grinned, “My star pupil. Now she’s employed with me as part of the PIEC program.”

“You pay me to eat sandwiches, apparently,” said Lexa quietly, and Clarke laughed, caught off guard by her unexpected, soft-spoken teasing. Lexa flushed again, just a little, and Clarke thought that her lips had maybe twitched up in a miniscule smile when she had laughed.

“I’m a terrible taskmaster,” Raven admitted, straight-faced, “Forcing food on poor innocents. You’d rather be back on the chain-gang, huh Lexa?”

“No,” said Lexa, very quickly, and the strain in her voice made Clarke think that she had reached the threshold of her tolerance for sarcasm, beyond which she refused to go, “I hated that.”

She picked up the empty plate and her glass and got up to carry them back to the kitchen. Clarke glanced over at Raven, saw her face sadden a little as she said gently, “Yeah, Lexa. I know you did. Don’t do the washing up, okay? I want to get your opinion on the Honcho before you have to go.”   

When Lexa came back she seemed restless, sitting on the edge of the couch with her hands fidgeting in her lap. She was clearly only half listening to Raven, who was talking animatedly about the car that had been brought in that afternoon. Clarke thought that Raven might grow irritated with her lack of attention, but instead she just paused halfway through a sentence and said suddenly, “What’s the plan then, Lexa?”

Lexa started and reached up to rub at the back of her neck, “Nothing. Sorry, keep going. I’m listening.”

“No, you’re not. You already know what the misfire’s about,” she turned in her chair and snatched a box of chalk from the windowsill, which she tossed over and Lexa caught smoothly, one-handed, “So enlighten me.”       

Lexa’s whole demeanour changed and she leapt up from the couch, still barefoot and plucking ineffectively at the flap of the flimsy cardboard box. Raven took it back from her and opened it, pulling out a stick of white chalk and offering it to her. She snatched it up and moved quickly to the blackboard, flipping it around to the unused side and beginning to write out a list of what Clarke vaguely recognised as engine components. Her writing was slanted and angular, like that of someone who had learned to write in a different, more graceful alphabet before being confined to the dull shapes of the Roman one. She glanced over one shoulder at Raven when she had finished, waited for her to nod to show that she was following, then began to cross things out, speaking quickly, in hurried intervals.

“It’s not a problem with the fuel pump, that’s been changed,” the chalk squeaked in a satisfying scratch across the surface of the board, “So has the fuel filter,” _scratch_ , “The carburettor’s new,” _scratch_ , “And even if it were the carburettor, the misfire would happen right at the ignition, or for a while after start-up. The same goes for a leaky injector,” _scratch_ , “It doesn’t, though: the engine reaches full operating temperature before it starts to skip.”

“How do you know that?”

Lexa paused and lowered the chalk, twirling it absently in her long, slim fingers, as if trying to remember how she had come to that conclusion, working backwards in her mind. At last she said, “The foreman drove it to Lincoln’s place last night and it only cut out in the last five miles. He was telling you that when I came out of the garage. Does it matter?”

“No, no. I trust you, I was just wondering.”

“Oh.” Lexa reached up again, “Good, because if we take that as a given, there’s only really one obvious answer. It’s either a spark problem or a compression problem.”

“It’s intermittent,” said Raven, “So not compression.”

Lexa scribbled something on the board, “A spark problem, then, when the engine’s warm. Sounds like a bad ignition coil.”       

Clarke couldn’t help but look impressed, “Christ, Raven, you weren’t lying.”

“Lying about what?” asked Lexa vaguely, coming back to sit on the couch without taking her eyes off of the plan on the board, which she seemed to be checking and double-checking for mistakes.

“Raven told me you’re a prodigy with cars.”

Lexa began pulling her shoes on, leaning back momentarily to glance at the clock in the kitchen through the open doorway, “An idiot savant. That’s what the Captain says.”

Clarke took a sharp breath and Raven said, “Lexa…” but she was already getting up to leave, running a hand through her hair and reaching back to tighten her hair tie a little.

“My shift is over; I have to get back for rollcall. Thank you for the sandwiches.” 

Raven sighed as she watched her disappear into the kitchen, then called out, “Stay safe, Lex!” just before the front door closed behind her.

“Sorry,” said Clarke, “I didn’t means to upset her.”

“You didn’t. I assure you, she’s fully capable of upsetting herself.” Raven got up and took the rest of the glasses to the sink in the kitchen. Clarke heard her starting the water to do the washing up and went over to stand in the doorway.

“I didn’t end up apologising.”

She shrugged, giving Clarke a fleeting smile, “I don’t think you needed to. She likes you, it would probably just have embarrassed her.”

Clarke nodded indecisively, then folded her arms loosely over her chest, and said “She had a cut on her forehead, did you see?”

Raven broke up half of a leftover sandwich crust and tossed it to the cat, who was winding around her legs, “Yeah, she gets injuries like that sometimes. I think most of the time it’s when things are overwhelming. Her coping mechanisms can be a little rough.”

“You think it’s from stimming?” Clarke tried to remember the little she had learned about autism in college, “Kids on the spectrum can usually find non self-injurious ways of stimming. Has she ever seen anyone? A therapist or a counsellor?”

“I doubt it. When she first came here she had a really bad… attack? I don’t know if that’s the right word. I didn’t see it, I just heard about it afterwards from Monroe. She was on the floor, apparently, like a little kid having a tantrum but a lot scarier. Monroe said she bit herself on the back of the wrist, and I’ve seen these thick calluses on the back of her hand here,” she showed Clarke a strip across her wrist, extending just past the head of her ulna, “Roan put her in a four-piece suit until it was over.”

Clarke eyed her warily, “A four-piece suit?”

“Full restraints: handcuffs, waist-chain, leg irons. It was in her first week and she didn’t speak for about nine days after that. I was starting to think she was physically mute, but then she came up to me in the garage one day and asked me really, really quietly for electrical tape.” 

“Fucking bullshit,” Clarke snapped and sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs, “What absolute bullshit is this?”

She was thinking again of Lexa on the road, of Lexa asleep on the couch: small and unhappy, but brave in the kind of way that no one her age should have to be brave. The thought of her chained up while her own body fought against her control was sickening, and it made Clarke wish she had done much more than put a band-aid on her brow and patted her hair. She wanted to hold her by the shoulders, wanted to rest her forehead against Lexa’s and apologise to her on behalf of the world, on behalf of every adult who had ever treated her worse than an animal. Most of all she wanted to say, “I see you. You’re a person.”   


	8. The Wrestle I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Referenced abuse and brief violence.

She had never enjoyed fighting. Even when she was younger and at the height of her high school boxing career, she had not felt anything in the ring that she could call pleasure. There had only been a numb, shaking breathlessness and the soft tickle of blood or sweat dripping down her face. For a long time after she first began boxing with Anya, she had been unable even to hit an opponent. The violence had seemed somehow missing in her, and Anya had despaired because her combinations with the focus mitts were nearly flawless, but with a sparring partner all she could do was duck. Her mind could not jump the abyss between thought and action, could not work the way Anya wanted. What would it feel like to induce pain in anyone else? She did not want to know, never wanted to find out, and that was why the first time stood out so clearly in her mind: a raised welt of a memory.

She had been in the ring with an opponent twenty pounds heavier, and Anya was standing on the side, calling her names Lexa knew she didn’t mean: masochist, punching bag, daddy’s girl. Her back was to Anya, so that her voice seemed to pummel at her from behind, and she could only keep her gloved hands close against her face as the other girl threw wild punches. None of them landed, Lexa was too quick for that, but her chest was beginning to heave painfully and her footwork was slowing.

“She’s begging for a left hook,” Anya snapped, “Give her one, you little shit.”

She was right, her opponent was lazy and wide open, her gloves held far too low and loose. Lexa saw a gap and willed herself to dart forward, but her knees locked and she had to scramble back clumsily to avoid a swing. It was a Thursday afternoon in late May and sunlight was falling in through the high windows of the gym, pooling in golden squares on the floor and warming her exposed shoulders. She knew her opponent must be feeling it across her whole torso, because she was wearing a sports bra, while Lexa would wear nothing more revealing than a singlet, and those only on safe days.

A good right jab forced her to leap backwards and it was then that she felt the ropes against her back and knew that she had trapped herself in a corner of the ring with Anya behind her and her opponent moving in from the front.

“I’m starting to think you’d really like a beating, Alex,” Anya said, low and close to her ear, using her father’s name for her: one filled with the threat of violence, “In which case, you can go home to daddy and stop wasting my time. He’s always happy to oblige.”

She had been fidgety all week, on the edge of an episode for days, and still sore from a run-in with her father two nights before. The weekend was approaching fast, and summer waited menacingly beyond that, time she would spend cooped up with her father now that Anya and her mother were gone. To hear her say that, Anya who she had thought was lost forever and then had found again as if by magic six months later, was shattering. Once, when he had been very, very angry, her father had twisted her arm behind her back and pushed up, then further up, until she had felt a final, agonising wrench as her shoulder dislocated with a grotesque popping sound. That was what it felt like when something came loose in her mind, when the pressure on her spirit seemed so great that she had to yield terribly or splinter.

With an odd, strangled noise she had lunged at her sparring partner and hit her with such a hook that she had fallen backwards, her nose spurting blood, which spattered across Lexa’s white singlet, the warmth of it soaking through the thin fabric. A second later Anya had been in the ring, hustling the other girl towards the locker room and leaving Lexa slumped and shivering against the ropes, sure that she was only a few breaths away from being violently ill. She barely registered Anya’s light grasp on her shoulders a few long moments later.

“Good kid,” Anya was saying, close to her, cupping her face very gently with both hands, “What a brave kid.”

It was ringing in her ears now: Anya’s voice, as she stood in the doorway of the barracks bathroom, taking in the scene before her in a split second, the moment it took to decide how to act. Octavia had been hustled into a corner by two of their platoon, girls Lexa had never talked to very much, and had never wanted to. She had heard vague rumours that one or both of them had been arrested for attempted murder, something ugly and gang-related. Lexa thought they probably had been in some kind of gang, but suspected that their crimes had been more to do with drugs than with murder. They both had track marks, and what they wanted from Octavia were the muscle relaxants Dr Griffin had given her the night before. Octavia was shaking her head, afraid but defiant, and as Lexa watched, the smaller of the girls reached up and slapped her smartly across the face. This was Octavia’s fight, and part of Lexa knew she should leave it alone, go back to her bunk and pretend not to hear the scuffling and gasps of pain. Later she would ignore Octavia’s quiet crying after the lights were put off and everyone was asleep.

That would be the smart thing to do, perhaps even what the Captain meant when he told them to find the ‘upstanding citizen’ in themselves, but she couldn’t do it. The only thing she could think about was Anya: her voice, her hands, her soft, guilty smile, all the times she had closed the door to their bedroom when the garden hose had come out of the cupboard. She remembered vividly how desperately she had daydreamed of Anya doing something, of opening the door and breaking her father’s wrist, and how instantly she forgave her when she did not. But Lexa did not want a second of Octavia’s forgiveness.

The girl slapped Octavia again and this time Lexa leapt forward from the doorway, barefoot and half-undressed for bed already, with her hair uncharacteristically loose. In four long-legged strides she was among them, seizing the smaller girl by the shirt and shoving her hard away from Octavia. The other one shouted something in surprise and anger, and that was when Lexa knew they were going to properly fight, inescapably, right in this moment. She was sickeningly afraid, but not for herself.

“Anyone who gets into a fight with you is a goddamn idiot,” Anya had told her once, and added with a small smirk, “or dangerously kinky.”

She side-stepped the girl’s lunge and hit her exactly once, a straight, simple jab to the mouth that sent her reeling away, spitting blood onto the tiled floor. Lexa glanced down at her reddening knuckles just as Octavia said, “Lexa, look out,” and the smaller girl tackled into her, sending them both down onto the floor, the tiles still slippery from showers earlier in the evening. At first Lexa was underneath and the girl was straddling her, raining down desperate, unfocused blows to her face and chest, only keeping her position by setting all her weight to pinning Lexa’s arms beneath her knees. Pain had long ago become a moot point for Lexa and the other girl had only got three or four good punches in before Lexa twisted and wrenched her into a wrestling hold so that they were both forced to be still, pressed uncomfortably close to each other in a tangle of tensed limbs.

“You don’t want to fight me,” Lexa said, very quietly, when she felt the girl let out a long, shaky breath, “You want to go to bed. I know: you’re tired.”

She thought perhaps that might be the end of it, that she could clean the blood from her face and be in her bunk before Azgeda came to turn the lights off, but then cold hands were dragging the two of them roughly apart and she knew before she was turned around that it was the Captain and his cousin. He had her firmly by the shoulder, so hard that Lexa knew there would be several small bruises there in the morning. Azgeda was holding the other girl by the wrist and Octavia was hovering near the bathroom door, looking anxious and angry. The other girl had vanished.

“You know something?” The Captain asked her, and gave Lexa a hard shake when she neither replied nor looked up at him, “I thought maybe we’d managed to curb that violent temper of yours.”

“I told you,” Azgeda said, “Wild animals only understand violence.”

Octavia made a small noise in the back of her throat and began to say something in her defense but the Captain snapped at her to shut up and go to fucking bed if she didn’t want to be in solitary for a week.

“Get that druggy piece of shit into a cell,” he told Azgeda, “Thirty-five and I are going to have a talk.”  

Octavia gave her a last, guilt-sickened look as the Captain pulled her out of the barracks, still barefoot and dressed only in boxer briefs and an undershirt. She did not resent her for staying quiet to avoid solitary confinement. Perhaps if it had been someone else, but Lexa knew that Octavia was terrified of small spaces. She didn’t know the details of her life before prison, but she could guess from bits and pieces that Octavia had been kept against her will somewhere dark and close for too long. In her second week she had been put in solitary overnight for talking back to one of the officers and Lexa had heard that she had wet herself and torn one of her own fingernails out scrabbling against the rough concrete walls of the cell. Now the threat of solitary was enough to induce utter panic in her.

Outside the air was cool and a cold wind blew sharply through her thin undershirt and against her bare legs. The gravel cut into the soles of her feet, but soon the Captain had pulled her onto the sports field and the dewy grass felt crisp and clean. She hated being so exposed, even in the dark, where only the Captain was close enough to see her. There were white, slightly raised scars across the back of her thighs, fewer and harder to make out than the ones on her back, but certainly visible just beneath the legs of her briefs. She knew because she had seen Octavia staring at them when she was changing, had felt the weight of the questions she wanted to ask but wouldn’t. They did not talk about their previous lives: not about claustrophobia, or scars, or whatever bullshit had brought them here. It was the greatest unspoken rule any of them had.

Her shoulder was released and the Captain pushed her roughly away from him so that she stumbled slightly, nearly tripping over her own bare feet in the grass. They both stood silently for a moment, and it struck Lexa suddenly that the Captain was reining himself in with an impressive show of self-restraint. She knew instinctively that he wanted to hit her, to get her down on the ground and kick her, feeling the solidness of his boot against the soft yield of midriff and thigh and the vulnerable place between the hip and the bottom rib. He held himself back, though, she supposed because it was still quite recently that the doctor had stitched her up and threatened to report the school if she ever saw any more dog bites, even on runaways. The officers had been agitated and Lexa could remember lying back on the narrow, paper-covered cot in the infirmary, only half-conscious from exhaustion and the intense pain of the bite on her lower thigh. She had been able to hear Dr Griffin on the other side of the door, almost outright yelling at the Captain. She had just replaced the previous doctor, who had left very quickly under what Lexa guessed were pressing circumstances, and she was not yet accustomed to the way things worked at the school.

“If she’d been bitten like that on the throat, she’d be dead,” Dr Griffin had said, her voice deceptively calm until it shook just slightly on the last word.

“My dogs know better,” said the Captain, bored and a little defensive.

“Really? They don’t know better than to maul children, apparently; a child whose health you are personally responsible for, Captain Azgeda. Frankly, I think it’s disgusting, and I’ll be speaking to the Warden about it at my first opportunity.” When the Captain began to speak, Dr Griffin cut him off sharply, “No – don’t tell me it was justified. As far as I’m concerned this kind of injury is indicative of an unacceptable use of force against a minor, even if it were inflicted in self-defence, which it was not.”

Later Dr Griffin had sat on her little wheeled stool beside the cot and tried to speak to Lexa about what had happened: why she had run away, what she was doing when the dog had bitten her. From the moment the doctor had clicked her ballpoint pen and rested the nib against the writing pad balanced on her knee, looking at her expectantly, Lexa had known it was a test. Her father had prepared her for similar ones her whole life, and there was only one way to pass.

“I want to go to sleep,” she had said, rolling onto her side and curling in on herself, “May I please?”

Dr Griffin had been caught off guard and she had put the paper and pen aside and rested a hand on Lexa’s hunched shoulder with a small sigh, “Yes, sweetheart. We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

Lexa had said nothing, and the next day she had allowed the Captain to march her out of the infirmary as soon as she had been given crutches, with no time for any more questions.

Now she thought he was probably remembering the same incident, maybe even trying to convince himself that a couple of months was long enough that the doctor could be told any number of stories and not be suspicious. He seemed to come to a decision, anyway, because his face changed and he gestured out across the field.

“Since you obviously have the energy to cause shit in the barracks, you can go ahead and give me ten laps. Then we’ll see what a fucking Rocky Balboa you are.”

Lexa was so tired that she simply stood in front of him, cold and loose-limbed, until he forced her roughly around and pushed her towards the faint track that ran around the circumference of the field. Even then, it took several unbalanced, staggering paces for her to find the right stride and begin to jog properly. Her hair fell into her face and at one point she stubbed her bad toe agonisingly against a stone in the long grass on the edge of the track. The field wasn’t lit and it was so dark at the far end that the only thing keeping Lexa from running into the forest by accident was the light coming from one of the windows of Raven’s cottage. The rest were all dark, and in the back of her mind Lexa wondered whose room it belonged to, and whether they were in a warm bed, with Félicette curled into a warm ball at their feet.

She managed a whole six laps before her legs gave out and she had to sit down heavily on the hard ground, panting and shivering, cold sweat glistening on her brow. The band-aid Clarke had stuck so gently to her forehead that afternoon was coming loose at one corner and as she lay back in the grass, breathing raggedly, she reached up with an absent-minded hand and ran her thumb across it to smooth it down again. She knew she had only a few moments before the Captain realised she had stopped running and came to exact punishment, but she found that she didn’t care. The stars were vast and coldly beautiful above her and she could hear a lone mourning dove somewhere in the trees, chuckling softly through the quiet darkness.

“Woods! Woods, where the fuck did you disappear to?”

Lexa allowed herself to sink even further into the grass, determined not to make his finding her any easier. If he wanted her, he would have to search this whole section of the darkened field until he tripped over her, and perhaps that would be a kind of revenge for whatever it was he would do to her when he found her. But then the white beam of a flashlight flicked along the ground just to the left of her and Lexa’s heart sank.

“Get up,” the Captain said, his voice unexpectedly level as he stood, looming over her.

“No.”

There was no defiance in it, nothing left but a bone-weary refusal to keep moving, to keep being hurt. Vaguely, she hoped that the Captain would behave like a bear and leave her alone if she played dead and did not try to run away.

“What did you say?”

“No. If I get up, you’ll hit me.”

There was a pause, and Lexa thought that perhaps her simple honesty had shocked the Captain somewhere well-guarded and private inside himself: a realisation of who he had become. She could hear only his breathing and her own for several seconds, then his breath hitched momentarily and he took a determined step towards her. The swift kick to her side barely even surprised her, and it was with long-learned instinct that she rolled onto her side and tucked her knees tightly up to her chest, her arms coming up to cover her head. Braced for several more kicks, she closed her eyes and waited.

“Fuck,” said the Captain, under his breath, and the tone of his voice was surprising enough that Lexa lifted one elbow away from her face to see what had disturbed him. About a hundred feet away, the door of Raven’s cottage had opened and warm, yellow light was spilling out onto the grass. There was a figure silhouetted in the doorway: Clarke, her blonde hair untidy and her body tensed as she looked out into the dark at them with her hands braced on either side of the doorjamb. To Lexa, cold and thoroughly beaten, she looked like the angel appearing to shepherds at Bethlehem: glorious and utterly terrifying. _Lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them_. For even at this distance she could tell that Clarke was blazingly, uncontrollably, magnificently angry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sincere apologies for the long wait. There have been some pretty serious student protests where I am so my access to a computer has been very limited.
> 
> Thank you again for the feedback, it's always appreciated.


	9. The Wrestle II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Brief violence and referenced animal abuse.

 

She had fallen asleep with her bedside lamp still lit. It was something she had done often in college, even when she hadn’t been drinking, and she felt a sharp sting of nostalgia when she woke up groggily, fully dressed on top of the bed covers. There were several pages from her sketchpad scattered over the bed and as she rolled over, Clarke found the thin, hard shape of her pencil pressed against the small of her back. She could remember sitting cross-legged on the bed earlier that evening, sketching idly while Raven showered and moved around the cottage humming to herself. When she had appeared in the doorway, knocking gently on the doorjamb to let Clarke know she was there, she had been dressed in dark jeans and a leather jacket, hair swept back prettily and car keys in hand.

“Yo,” she had said, fiddling awkwardly with her keys so that they jingled, “I’m going into town, right? Don’t wait up.”

Clarke had nodded, giving her a sly smile, “Sure, sure. You look nice.”

“Hmm… Don’t fall asleep with the lamp burning. You’ll set the whole place on fire.”

She went sidling off and a few minutes later Clarke had heard the roar of a car engine and the rumble of it moving off along the dirt track. She had sunk down a bit further on the bed, correcting the curve of an eye, the twist of a curl, and when she had fallen asleep she had dreamed of that face: sharp lines and a gentle mouth, the wary little frown.

A cool breeze blew in from her open, unshuttered window and she forced herself up from the bed to close it. The night outside was very dark and there were no lights left on at the school, the buildings nothing but black shapes against the swell of the mountainside. She stood still at the window for a moment, gazing out at the darkness and listening to the faint calls of a mourning dove from somewhere behind the cottage. She was about to reach for the window latch when there was movement to her right and she squinted across the sports field, trying to make out what it was. There was a faint sense of dread, settling low down in the pit of her stomach, and the growing realization of just how alone she was, how far from other people.

Finn had always said that the countryside made him uncomfortable. He said that at least in the city you always knew what your neighbors were doing, sometimes too well. In the countryside, the houses are far apart and fundamentally private, no matter how assuredly people claim to be such lovely, open neighbors. Clarke knew that he had spoken from bitter experience, that he had been sent away from home to live on a ranch with his grandfather when he was a teenager and had been miserably mistreated.

“You know what they say about unhappy families,” she had said softly into his chest as they lay close together in their little apartment over the café, “They’re all unhappy in their own way. People can be just as cruel in the city.”

He had been quiet for a while after that, in the way Clarke would later call broody but at the beginning had found thoughtfully endearing.

“But it’s unspeakable cruelty in the country,” he had replied at last, almost to himself, “Literally, I mean. No one will talk about it and there’s no one to hear it.”

Clarke had sensed the despair in his voice and could do nothing to comfort him but nuzzle closer and turn her face up to kiss him, gentle and assuring. She had forgotten what he had said, had not fully understood it until now.

Her eyes found the movement again, still on the right but closer now, and slowly her sight adjusted to the dark, the movement resolving itself into a shadowy figure jogging around the edge of the field. It was Lexa, her rail-thin form instantly familiar, her hair loose and wild in the breeze. The nearer she drew to the cottage, the more Clarke struggled to understand what was happening. Her initial relief at recognizing her was quickly replaced with mounting concern as she passed the front of the cottage: barefoot and wearing almost nothing, her body moving stiffly, maybe painfully. Clarke stepped away from the window and snatched her wristwatch from the bedside table.

“Nine fucking thirty,” she muttered to herself, pulling sneakers on over her socks and jamming the laces down the sides. Her immediate thought was that this was an escape attempt, but as she carried her paraffin lamp through to the kitchen, slowly and nervous of dropping it, she heard a shout from outside: a man’s voice, sharp and joyously angry as a dog that has found something small and vulnerable in long grass. She set the lamp down on the table, took a steadying breath and yanked open the front door.

A flashlight was illuminating an area of the field on the left, and she could see the hulking figure of the Captain, broad-shouldered in his black uniform. He was holding a big metal flashlight at shoulder-height, shining it down on Lexa, who was lying stretched out on the ground. They seemed to be speaking, although Clarke was too far away to hear what was being said. Then, as she watched, the Captain took a step forward and kicked Lexa sharply in the ribs.

Clarke had been fiery as a teenager but never violent, and she could remember the only time she had hit someone very clearly. It had been a fight over a stray dog she had found her next-door neighbor tormenting in his back yard. He was a strange boy: small for his age and loud-mouthed. When they were younger Abby had tried to get Clarke to play with him more often, had invited him over to bake cookies or play at soldiers in the creek behind their street, but she had never taken to him. He didn’t like it when she tried to explain games to him, called her bossy if she asked him to do something and a baby if she wouldn’t do what he wanted. By the time they were fifteen they barely spoke to each other and Clarke found she was relieved when he avoided her in the hall at school, only offering her a disinterested grunt if she said hello.

One afternoon in the summer before their junior year, Clarke had been sitting against the trunk of a big oak tree in her own back yard, drawing in her sketchbook and enjoying the sunlight on her face and arms. There had been a muffled sound drifting over the shared plank fence between their yards: a high-pitched, intermittent squealing that she could not force herself to ignore. She had put her sketching things aside and had gone across to the fence, stretching up on her toes to see over the top of it, although a small part of her quickly wished she hadn’t. The boy had a little dog, a puppy maybe, tied to the leg of a barbeque grill by a string noose and was burning the tip of its tail with a cigarette lighter. The dog would scream and try to pull away but that would only tighten the noose and choke it. Without saying anything or even realizing what she was doing, Clarke had scrambled untidily over the fence and pulled the boy roughly away by the shoulders. He had been surprised and afraid, and had pushed her off of him, at which point she had flung a fist into his face hard enough that he had lost his balance and fallen into the swimming pool.

She felt like that now, so impossibly angry and disgusted that she could only compare it to being stupidly drunk or feverish. Nothing seemed real, everything hazy and out of her control. She left the doorway and stalked across the field, her own sneakered feet seeming not her own as they moved over the slightly dewy grass. A part of her mind recognized that she must be a pathetically unthreatening figure, twenty-three and sleep-ruffled in her college sweatshirt and an old pair of running shorts from her high school track team. When she got close enough to see Roan’s face, though, she realized with an abstracted sense of surprise that he looked afraid, more afraid and uncertain than she had ever seen a grown man look. She guessed somewhere in the back of her mind, hard to hear over the pounding of her anger, that he did not know how much she had seen. A sharp, blood-thirsty thrill of triumph ran through her: she had witnessed the kick, would tell anyone and everyone, would make his life a misery. Then there was the cold realization that the kick might not be the only thing he was hoping she hadn’t seen. What else might he have done, tonight and on many other occasions, when she was not here to stop it?

“What the fuck,” she said, “Do you think you’re doing?”

She had come to a stop only a meter or two away from them, feet sturdily planted and arms crossed over her chest. Lexa was still on the ground, not sprawled on her back anymore but curled up on her side with her hands over her head. The fact that she was really only in her underwear seemed even more sickeningly apparent up close and Clarke felt that merely looking at her so underdressed was shameful, a violation. She turned instead to the Captain, who had not said anything yet. When he met her gaze, standing there with his boots inches from Lexa’s face, the fear she had seen moments before was gone.

“This is a private disciplinary matter,” he said, very calmly, as if she had walked into his office at an inconvenient moment, “It isn’t your concern, Miss Griffin.”  

“The fuck it isn’t.”

His face hardened subtly and he glanced down at Lexa, then back at Clarke, “I didn’t know you were so much more intimately familiar with our disciplinary code than myself. In my understanding, as the Correction Captain at this institution I have every right to dispense corrective measures when and if I find them necessary. One such measure is the enforcement of physical exertion.”

“Barefoot and in underwear? I’d like to see that clause. Not that any of it really fucking matters anyway, since I know for a goddamn fact that kicking the shit out of someone is not on any disciplinary code in the country. It’s called assault, Captain Azgeda, perhaps you’ve heard of it.”  

He said nothing, his expression as slack as if he hadn’t heard her, nudging Lexa in the chest with the toe of his boot and sighing when she only curled up more tightly. It was when he bent down and grabbed her by the crook of her elbow, trying to yank her up, that Clarke found she could not take it anymore. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and fumblingly switched it to video, raising it up horizontally and in both hands to face Roan, who had managed to haul Lexa unsteadily to her feet.

“It’s 21:45 on the evening of Thursday the 26th of May. I’m here at Ton Detention Center, witnessing the assault and harassment of a teenaged inmate by one Roan Azgeda, identification badge number 54062.”

The effect was immediate: he let go of Lexa like it physically hurt him to keep touching her. She swayed a little, her eyes closed and her face pale, and Clarke took the opportunity to push roughly past the Captain, still filming with her phone in one hand, and put an arm very gently around Lexa’s waist to keep her upright. She was between Lexa and Roan now and saw with some satisfaction that he seemed uncertain again, eyeing her phone almost self-consciously. Lexa was leaning heavily into her, perhaps only half-conscious of what was happening, and she could feel her shivering.

“Stop filming,” said the Captain.

“No, I don’t think I will; not until you back the fuck up and leave.”

He drew in a very deep, calming breath, and Clarke thought she could see something resembling desperation lingering in the subtle movements of his face. It was so like an expression of Finn’s, a confused little boy trapped in a position he neither understood nor knew how to escape, that she was thrown by it for a moment, almost pitying. The other boy had looked at her that way too, the one with the dog, dripping wet and crying hopelessly like someone much younger, pleading with her not to tell his parents.

She felt Lexa’s body against hers again, the delicate strength of her limbs, the narrowness of the hips she had circled with her arm, and her anger surged again, colder and wearier than before.

“Give me your arm,” she said to Lexa, taking it gently by the wrist and slinging it around her neck to better support her. Lexa kept it loose for a moment, as if startled by the closeness of their bodies, then her grip tightened slightly against the back of Clarke’s neck as she yielded her weight to the new position.

“I’ll have to tell the Warden about this,” Roan said, and while his voice was steady, he seemed a little further away from them than before.

“Please do.”

“She won’t be pleased. I don’t know how much you value your position here, but I hope you weren’t planning on a long-term arrangement.”

Clarke snorted, “I’d rather fucking die, though I do appreciate your threatening me on camera. How would the Warden feel about a wrongful dismissal claim? Something to compliment the gross misconduct charges.” 

She did not want to talk to him a moment longer than she had to. Even as he opened his mouth to reply, she was turning away and beginning to help Lexa back to the cottage. He did not follow them and by the time Clarke glanced back over her shoulder at the cottage door, he had disappeared into the darkness of the unlit field.

The lit kitchen was warm and familiar after the cold grass and the huge black sky. The cat had woken up and was sitting on the table next to Clarke’s lamp, her tail twitching absent-mindedly against the dark wood like a strange white worm writhing slowly on rich soil. Clarke felt Lexa start, as if the sudden light and warmth had shocked her into wakefulness again, and she pulled away from her, standing awkwardly still while Clarke closed the door behind them. When she turned back, Lexa was watching her blankly, her arms wrapped around herself. Clarke could see that the fingers of one hand were running lightly over the thin fabric of her undershirt: up and down, over and over. She had beautiful hands, narrow and long-fingered.

“Tell me what you want,” Clarke said, holding up her own hands slightly in a peaceable gesture, “I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

Lexa’s shoulders dropped and she reached up to rub roughly at her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose between finger and thumb. It was at that moment that Clarke realised how wrong she had been to think this was anything like the boy and the tortured dog. Perhaps Roan was a sadistic little kid somewhere deep down, but it was a bad mistake to underestimate Lexa, to take her for something small and hysterical with pain. She was very, very withdrawn, as if she was listening to Clarke from the bottom of a deep well, but there was a nobility in her grave, sad face that refuted pity.

After a long moment, she took her hand away from her face and Clarke saw with rousing fury that there were traces of blood around her nose and upper lip, a pink crescent of swelling under one eye. She wanted to ask who had hit her, was already sure that it had been Roan, but Lexa seemed to be making a concerted effort to look at her, not in the eyes but close above them.

“I’d like to shower, please. I’m cold and I feel…” She stopped and looked away quickly. There were three scratches on her neck, just where it met her shoulder, and they were still bleeding lightly.

“Okay,” said Clarke, “Okay, come on.”

She took her through to the little bathroom, lit the candle on the windowsill and turned the hot water on in the old bathtub-shower, yanking the plastic curtain closed to keep the floor dry. Lexa was lingering in the doorway, holding herself again and still shivering. Clarke gestured for her to come in and she edged cautiously forward.

“Do you need help? Getting undressed, or in the shower? You look like you’re about to fall over.”

Lexa shook her head vigorously, and maybe a little panicked, “No.”

“Alright. I’ll be outside, though, so if you’re in trouble – call me, okay?”

She waited for Lexa to nod, then went out and closed the door. For a while she just stood in the dark sitting room, nauseous with repressed anger and a hot, weepy helplessness. She could hear the sound of the ancient geyser moaning in the ceiling and the wind buffeting at the cottage walls, and could not remember being more miserable in her life, except possibly at her father’s funeral. Eventually she fetched the paraffin lamp from the kitchen, went back into her bedroom and dug out some clothes for Lexa: a t-shirt and sweatpants. It was in the close silence of her bedroom that her mind began to work again and she sat down heavily on the bed, found her phone and called the Polis police station.

The man who answered after the eighth ring sounded half-asleep and Clarke had to ask him twice whether she had the right number before he would confirm that she had reached the Sherriff’s Office.

“I’d like to report an assault,” she said, “At the Ton Detention Centre.”

“Is one of the Corrections Officers injured?” asked the deputy, his voice urgent and gravelly on the other end of the line. It was a bad connection, and Clarke had to cover her free ear to hear him properly.

“No, it’s an assault on one of the inmates.”     

There was a brief silence, then he said, “Is the assault on-going, ma’am?”

“No. It happened about twenty minutes ago. I have video footage.”

“Can I get your name, please?”

She gave it to him painstakingly, having to repeat her first name several times. By the time he could spell it back to her without corrections, all she wanted to do was hang up.

“Well,” he said, with a sigh that echoed loudly amid the crackle of static, “We won’t be able to send anyone out tonight, but maybe in the morning.”

Clarke bunched the bed covers in her hand, pressing the phone so tightly to her ear that is was almost painful. She wanted to shout at him, to make him understand the urgency, the horror of the thing, but knew very clearly that it would not help.

“Thank you,” she said, allowing the bitterness to seep into her voice, sharp and satisfying, then she hung up and threw her phone across the bed.

There was a very quiet knock on her open bedroom door and she looked around to see Lexa, dressed in her underclothes again but with a towel wrapped around her. Her hair was damp and the dried blood and dirt that had smeared her face was gone. She seemed a little better, a little more present.

“Do you have band-aids?” she asked softly, “My feet… I think I might be getting blood on the carpet.”

“Of course,” Clarke got up and pressed the pile of folded clothes into her hands, “Put these on, if you’d like. I’m sorry I don’t have anything that would fit you better, they’ll probably be too big. I’m going to get Raven’s first-aid kit; I’ll be back in a second.”

When she came back, Lexa was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing Clarke’s clothes. They were too big, but not in the way that all of her prison uniforms seemed not to fit her. These were loose at the chest and hips, slightly too short in the legs and arms. Clarke had never seen her out of uniform, and like this she seemed older, perhaps, but softer too and deeply familiar: like someone Clarke had known for a long time, seen in these clothes every night for years and years.

She was trying to towel her hair dry, but it was unruly and difficult to reach at the back. Clarke put the first-aid kit on the bed and knelt down in front of her, reaching up to take the towel from her gently.

“Here,” she said, “Let me.”

Lexa hesitated, her face partly hidden by the falling edge of the towel, then surrendered it to Clarke, letting her hands drop to her lap, where they clasped each other. Clarke ran the towel over her hair, thorough but immaculately careful, smoothing it around the back of her ears and the nape of her neck. When her hair seemed dry enough she stopped and lowered the towel, taking it away from Lexa’s face. Their eyes met and it was the first time she had ever made eye-contact with her. She could hear their breathing, almost in unison but not quite.

Then Lexa leant forward with the haste of someone who does not want to think about what they are about to do, and kissed her.  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, I'm sorry it took a while to get this chapter up. After two really hellish weeks, there is enforced calm on campus and my computer access is a bit better. If the peace lasts, I'll update more regularly.
> 
> Thank you so much for the comments, they're always appreciated.


	10. Cotton

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Referenced abuse

It was not as if she had never kissed anyone. Of course there had been Tia. For what had seemed like a long time there had been Tia: dark and strongly-built with gentle hands and bright, laughing eyes. She was eighteen months older, a junior at Lexa’s high school, and they had found each other at a boxing league meet. They hadn’t been in the ring, because Tia was a featherweight and Lexa was still what Anya called a ‘scrawny little flyweight’, but Tia had come to sit down next to her on the gym stands. She had just lost a bout against a girl from a bigger high school in the neighbouring city, and she was sweaty and a little sore-looking around the left side of her jaw. She was cheerful, though, still shaky with adrenaline, and when she sat down she was smiling at Lexa like she had won her whole division.

“What up, short stuff?” she said, “Did you see me out there?”

Lexa had been badly startled, unsure of why this pretty, happy girl had collapsed onto the bench beside her. Anya had left her to go and coach one of her older girls in a bantamweight bout and Lexa had been fine by herself, eating the apple slices Anya had given her in a ziploc bag. She had won her own bout and was moving through to the under-fifteen semi-finals the next weekend, but the excitement of that seemed muted.

“I… uh. Yeah, I did.”

Tia had smiled again, softer this time, and stretched her legs out in front of her with a small groan.

“Well, I saw you, short stuff. I hope that other kid didn’t like her nose real straight.”

Lexa knew she had broken the girl’s nose, had not wanted to think about how it had felt, collapsing under the pressure of her gloved fist. To get Tia to stop talking about it, she held out her bag of apple slices to her and she thanked her politely, taking one and chewing it on the good side of her mouth.

“You’re Mr Woods’ kid, right?”

“Yeah.”

There had been a slightly awkward silence, and suddenly Lexa had known she was supposed to introduce herself. Social cues came to her like that sometimes, all at once.

“Alexandra,” she said.

Tia had nodded, wiping a hand on her shorts and offering it to her, “Costia Adedipe. Can I call you Alex?”

“No,” said Lexa, carefully, “But you can call me Lexa.”

They had talked a little more and later that evening Tia had seen her walking home along the edge of the road and had given her a lift. Things had progressed from there and quite quickly Tia had been coming to pick her up most Saturdays. When her father was out or in a generous mood, Lexa could go clattering excitedly down the old porch steps and slide into the passenger side with a shy smile. If it wasn’t a good day, Tia would park her beat-up Volkswagen Beetle around the corner and come and sit with Lexa on the porch for a while. Her father would be broody and cool with Tia when she was around, and sometimes he would hit Lexa after Tia had left, but she had found that she didn’t care very much. It was worth it: to have the warmth of Tia’s body beside her, the smell of her deodorant, of her laundry detergent. Everything about her was so much better than beatings were bad. She asked if she could touch her and Lexa almost never said no; she asked always, even if it was just to brush a piece of Lexa’s wild hair back behind her ear, to undo the top button of her collar in hot weather, to wrap her hands before a bout. Nothing about her ever hurt.

“Can I kiss you?” she had asked once, when they were sitting in her car with the engine off outside Lexa’s house. They had been to a movie at Polis’ tiny duplex cinema and Tia had paid without even waiting for Lexa to get her wallet out, because she knew that the allowance Lexa got from her father was mostly not enough to cover just her boxing things, that when she occasionally had a little left over at the end of the month she liked to use it for second-hand paperbacks or extra food, that she was growing quickly and was always hungry.  

Lexa had taken a shallow breath and said, “Yes,” and she had lent slowly over the gearshift and kissed her very softly on the mouth, hands coming up to cup around the back of Lexa’s ears, to slide fingers into her unkempt curls. Perhaps that was why she had kissed Clarke, that feeling of her hands just behind her ears was like a hard knock to the back of her head, jolting Tia loose from whatever vault her mind had been hiding her in.

For three seconds there was absolutely nothing, and their lips were touching and Clarke was very still. Her mouth moved minutely against hers and then she was pulling back suddenly, separating them, putting a light hand on Lexa’s cheek, her palm smooth and cool but slight calluses on the tips of her fingers. Lexa was hyper-aware, all at once, of how crazily stupid it had been to do what she had done, and she tried to look away, to look anywhere but at Clarke. Another hand stopped her though, resting low on her jaw, making her meet Clarke’s eyes.

She must have seen something in Lexa’s gaze, some deep, hard sorrow because her eyes widened slightly, looked more intensely into her face.

“Hey, Lexa, hey. No, it’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong,” she paused, taking a long breath, “This is just really complicated, right?”

She took her hands away and folded them neatly on her thighs, sitting back on her heels in front of Lexa, who had seized the opportunity to duck her head down and stare fixedly at her bare, blood-smeared feet.

“You’re lovely, Lexa,” Clarke was saying, “I’m sorry you haven’t been told that enough. You’re lovely and your situation is shitty and none of it is fair. I don’t want to take advantage of you when you’re tired and hurt… and maybe you feel like you owe me something.”

Lexa was feeling dizzily nauseous and her lungs burned strangely, as if she were still running, dragging in cold air through her mouth, but she knew that there was something important Clarke wanted her to understand. She forced herself to look up at her, those eyes gazing at her face, and nodded slowly. It was perhaps connected to Tia, to the asking before touching, but also to what Anya had used to say about her.

“She’s nearly seventeen, Lex,” She had said, “You’ve only just turned fifteen. No one usually gives a fuck about one year, but if your dad catches you at something he could get her arrested, okay? So just… be careful.”

Clarke didn’t seem satisfied that she understood properly. Her watchful eyes were still soft, and Lexa could see the little crumple of a frown on her brow, like she was trying with immense difficulty to read Lexa’s face: blank and maybe still wary-looking. Lexa didn’t know how else she could reassure her though, so she nodded again, more firmly this time. Clarke smiled at that and reached over for the first aid kit on the bed, unzipping it and spilling some of its contents out onto the floor next to her. There was a small silence as she moved her hands over band-aids and rubbing alcohol, then she got up in a sudden lurch and Lexa reeled back instinctively. To her absolute disgust she found that she had thrown an arm up to protect her face, that Clarke was standing very still, almost frozen, looking surprised and upset. Slowly, Lexa lowered her arm, glanced fleetingly at Clarke’s face, so ashamed that she thought she might cry for the first time in three years, and said, “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”

“No,” said Clarke, very simply, still standing nearly motionless, “Don’t be. There are a lot of people who ought to be sorry, and not one of them is you.”

She went out for a minute, and Lexa could hear the sound of a faucet running in the bathroom and possibly a very quiet, choked-sounding “Fuck”. Then she was back with a bowl of steaming water and a rag, sitting cross-legged on the floor and pressing the rag into the water to soak. Her face was calmer now and Lexa relaxed a little when she looked up at her with an unforced, reassuring smile.

“Can I touch your feet?” She asked, “I’ll be careful, I promise: I’m just going to make sure the open blisters don’t have any dirt left in them.”

When Lexa nodded, she took her feet gently into her lap and ran the warm, wet rag lightly over the weeping sores on Lexa’s feet where her blisters had been burst open by running barefoot over rough ground. There were many of them and it burned when Clarke patted them dry and dabbed rubbing alcohol onto them with cotton balls, but not in a bad way. Lexa had learned early about good pain and bad pain, and there was something clean and comforting about the sharp sting of disinfectant. It reminded her of Anya’s cotton swabs scraping carefully over a split lip between rounds, of her father spraying an aerosol disinfectant onto her skinned knees when she was very little, making funny faces at her to distract her. 

“You’re a hell of a runner, you know,” Clarke said, breaking the silence that had settled between them, “I saw you yesterday. You must have been great at track in high school.”

“I never ran track.”

Clarke glanced up at her: curious, maybe disbelieving, “Really? Not at all?”

“No.”

“You did some other sport then, huh? Something intense, I swear to God, to get you in that kind of shape.”

Lexa hesitated, a small, furry thing caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. She felt helpless in front of Clarke: this golden-haired avenging angel, this lion of Judah. There was no reason to lie, except that telling the truth would be the first piece in the puzzle of her life at the school, a puzzle she ardently hoped Clarke would never want to solve. Why was she here? Why did no one ever come to visit her? Why did she deserve every punishment they gave her and much, much more than that? It could all be answered in a single admittance, in a twenty second blip of her life.

“No,” she said at last, “No sports.”

Clarke shrugged but did not challenge her, smoothing the last band-aid on the back of Lexa’s heel with both index fingers and letting her pull her feet out of her lap.

“Are you hurt anywhere else?” she asked, tentatively, “Your face… did he hit you?”

“No. I… I got in a fight.”

There was that dubious look again, and Lexa half-thought she should be offended that Clarke did not seem to take her word for anything, but there was another part of her that was oddly relieved by it, relieved to the point of grief. It had been a very long time since anyone had so openly doubted that she was anything other than inherently delinquent, inherently violent. She vividly remembered her father jabbing a finger at her across their narrow kitchen table over dinner, infuriated by ‘that look’ on her face: an expression she had never been able to identify in herself, which had somehow warranted punishment. It was that inherent badness that he had always wanted to thrash out of her, which she had thought made her so hatefully good at boxing, and that was what Clarke seemed to be able to disbelieve with casual certainty.  

“You don’t seem like the type,” said Clarke, as if she had read her thoughts, and Lexa paused momentarily, then gave a quiet, unhappy laugh and held up her right hand so that Clarke could see her swollen knuckles.

“Shit, okay. Come on, I think Raven has frozen peas in the freezer.”

They went through to the darkened kitchen and Clarke lit another paraffin lamp awkwardly, using up several matches in the attempt, striking them in the cautious, hurried way of a non-smoker. Lexa sat down at the table because it was uncomfortable to stand on her aching feet, and because all of the adrenaline of the past hour had gone, leaving her knees trembling. The clothes Clarke had given her were very soft, as if she knew how endlessly, how hopelessly she longed for clothes that did not rub and tickle like the cheap polyester t-shirts and coarse overalls issued by the school. The simple, inoffensive feeling of them against her skin was enough in itself to make her sleepy, and unconsciously she turned her head to rub her nose into the loose shoulder of the t-shirt. It was something she had used to do ritualistically when she was much younger, in bed before she fell asleep.

“Here,” Clarke sat in the chair beside her with one leg folded up underneath her, and gave her an unopened bag of frozen peas, pointing at one side of her own face, “Put that on your eye, and let me see your hand, okay?”

Lexa used her left hand to hold the ice-slick bag against the flushed swelling under her eye and surrendered her other one to Clarke, who cradled it loosely, palm-down in her own, resting a washcloth filled with ice cubes on her sore knuckles. Lexa discovered in a flash of reminiscence that the numb, almost painful feeling of a cold washcloth on swollen skin was another foolproof invocation of Tia: not after a bout, because Anya was a jealous coach and would let no one else ice her, but of the first time she had really gotten a good idea of Lexa’s relationship with her father.

She had known for a long time that there was something unhappy between them, and Lexa had been able to sense that she didn’t like the way her father spoke to her, the way he would put a heavy hand on the nape of her neck when he was talking to her, as if he thought she wouldn’t listen unless he had hold of her. Tia’s own parents could be strict enough when they felt like it, though, so she was stiffly polite around him and never said anything about it. Then one Friday evening, nearly a year after they had started seeing each other, Lexa had come home after her curfew, been quickly and resoundingly smacked for it, and had mouthed off in a moment of uncharacteristic defiance.

This was around the time that her father had begun to ramp up his approach to her - more aggressive, less in control. There had always been violence, but it had been a ritual: the lecture, the garden hose, the pause between blows. Now there were regular open-handed slaps, and shoves at moments she didn’t expect. She guessed that it was because of the growth spurt that had hit her at fifteen, when she had done a lot of bone-achingly fast growing and become at least as tall as he was, perhaps even a little taller because he was smaller than most men. Maybe he felt that he was losing some of his power over her and had to make it up by force. Whatever it was, he had been incensed that night and had somehow managed to dislocate her shoulder. She was fairly sure he hadn’t realised how serious the damage had been, because she had been too surprised by the incredible pain of it and too frightened of him in that moment to scream. When his anger was spent, he had stalked off to his study and Lexa had been in enough pain, unsettled enough by the strange bulge of her injured shoulder, to climb awkwardly out of her bedroom window and phone Tia at a payphone in the parking lot of a liquor store nearby.

“Can you come and get me?” she had said, as calmly as possible, “I think I need to go to the hospital.”

Tia had asked a few quick, practical questions. Her mother was a nurse, her father a paramedic at the lumber mill, and she had been able to guess that the shoulder was dislocated just by Lexa’s description of it over the phone. When she had pulled up at the parking lot ten minutes later, she had half a cooler box of ice in the back seat and an expression that even Lexa knew meant trouble.

At Lexa’s insistence they had driven all the way to the hospital in the next town over, where they wouldn’t be recognised, and Tia had sat with her in the emergency room, filling out her forms for her and holding a washcloth full of ice to her shoulder. There had been mottled bruises growing in an ugly strip around her wrist, where her father had gripped her as he forced the arm behind her back, and Lexa had told the doctor who relocated her shoulder that it had happened in a judo armlock. It was at that point that Tia had known for sure what had happened. Lexa had seen it in her face as soon as the lie was out of her mouth, and she had been more pained by that than the gentle backwards tug with which the doctor had popped her shoulder back into place.

“Can we please not talk about it,” Lexa had asked on the drive home, her arm in a sling, a little high from the painkillers they had given her at the hospital, “Please, Tia?”

They had not talked about it, but it had still festered between them, and when they finally decided to stop seeing each other it was after four months of unvoiced frustration and sadness: a rot that had gradually eaten away at all the things that had kept them together. At the heart of it was what Lexa knew Tia thought of as her wilful inability to help herself, her pathetic devotion to her father even when he hurt her, what Anya called her ‘masochism’.

“It’s my pain,” she had snarled at Tia in one of a series of awful, quiet arguments they had had in the last days of their time together, “It’s my body, not yours. I can do whatever I want with it.”

Tia had looked at her steadily, knowingly, and even when Lexa had ducked her head away she had felt those lovely dark eyes upon her: “Of course I don’t own your body, Lexa. But if you really think that you owe me nothing, not even your own safety, then I don’t know if I can keep doing this - if we should keep doing this.”   

Clarke held the ice against her knuckles for a long time, her eyes not on Lexa but on the scratched wooden table top, distracted, as if she was deep in thought. Lexa did not want to think about Tia anymore, because there was only one memory of her after they had separated that mattered, and if her mind did so much as brush gingerly against it she would be ill. Instead she studied Clarke’s face while she could do it without being noticed, and after a while Clarke seemed to rouse herself from her thoughts and looked up. Their eyes met and Clarke smiled at her, gentle and still a little unfocused. Very, very slowly, with half her face hidden by the bag of frozen peas, Lexa smiled back.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for the comments and kudos - feedback is always great.


	11. Want

She lay very still in bed on her back, gazing up at the splash of early morning sunlight across the ceiling. The cottage was absolutely quiet and Clarke’s unshuttered window looked out onto a silent, grey dawn. The air in her bedroom was cool, but not uncomfortably cold, and Clarke had her bare arms free of the blankets, folded under her head. She had been awake until the early hours of the morning, long after Lexa had fallen asleep on the couch, and when she had slept it had been restless, filled with fragments of unintelligible dreams. In the end she had given up the idea of sleeping and had simply lain there, trying to think of nothing but her own breathing. That was something a therapist had suggested, when one of her professors had sent her to the college counselling centre several weeks after her father had died.

It had been what her mother had called a ‘difficult time’, perhaps the worst of Clarke’s life. Her father was dead: not after a long illness or anything else that might have given her time to prepare, but in a few seconds. She had sat in the library, or in class, or alone at the desk in her dorm room, and thought obsessively about her father’s life, how it had all gone speeding recklessly forward to that one moment. All of his life, every memory she had of him, seemed spoiled by the retrospective inevitability of his death. It was morbid and awful, but she couldn’t stop, and she didn’t sleep or eat properly for nearly a month. Then her girlfriend, the first woman she had allowed herself to love so officially, had quietly ended their relationship, like a nurse deftly turning off a respirator. Clarke had felt absolutely numb, had stopped eating altogether, and her mind would play the cycle of her father again and again: as a baby, as a solemn little boy, as a teenager with a kind smile. She saw him in the suit he’d been married in, shy and excited with his tie slightly crooked, and made herself sick wondering how someone so close and real could be confined and destroyed in the time it would take to count to five.

“Do you really think that?” the therapist had asked her, “You make it sound like your father has been… reduced to the way he died. Do you feel like that?”

Clarke had said nothing, sitting stiff-limbed in the uncomfortable chair across from her. She had felt like shrugging, but that had seemed sullen and childish, so she had bitten down on the inside of her cheek and listened to the therapist encouraging her to think about good things involving her father. If Clarke found she was incapable of that, she was told to empty her mind completely, to convince herself into a calmer place. She had left the counselling centre at the end of her twenty minute appointment and had not gone back for the next one, but the trick of lying still and listening to her own steady breathing had worked more often than she had expected, although not always.

Now, as she drew in one long breath after another, she could not stop the flood of images, not of her father anymore, but of Lexa: on the road, asleep with her head beside Clarke’s lap, curled up on the dewy grass in the dark, dressed in her own clothes in the light of a paraffin lamp. The thought of her in pain, or afraid, or humiliated shuddered through her like a physical discomfort. Lexa had not let her do very much for her the night before, would not admit to being in pain, not even where the Captain had kicked her. Clarke had made her a cup of tea, which she had drunk with some aspirin, then had tried to convince her to take the bed, but had met a kind of quiet obstinacy that was nearly impossible to argue with. Lexa knew where to find spare blankets in a cupboard and had fastidiously brushed her teeth with her finger and some of Raven’s toothpaste, then had rolled herself in a blanket on the couch and fallen asleep with the cat. For a long time, Clarke had sat in the kitchen, looking into the darkened living room and thinking about what to do. At last she had moved quietly back to her bedroom, found her phone and messaged her mother. There had been no reply, but that did not mean anything when it came to Abby. Clarke could remember scores of messages she had sent over the years, which her mother had read and never replied to. It was a glib little summation of their relationship.  

She got up slowly, making the bedsprings creak, and ran both hands through her hair before twisting it back into a loose bun. When she was dressed, she opened the door carefully and stuck her head out into the living room, pushing up the sleeves of her sweater. Lexa was hidden by the high back of the couch, but Clarke could hear the soft sound of her breathing. It was a relief to know she was still there, that she hadn’t gone back to the school in the night, or run away. Clarke had trouble deciding which of the two would have been worse. The school was a hellhole, she knew that now beyond a doubt, but where could Lexa have run to that the police wouldn’t have followed and hauled her back? She did not want to consider what the punishment for running away might be, and she guessed Lexa was better off finishing her sentence and going home to her parents, to where her family would take care of her.

Clarke padded into the living room and lent against the back of the couch, resting her chin on her arms and considering Lexa intently. She slept like she had the afternoon before, completely loose, uncharacteristically unguarded. One hand was tucked neatly under her cheek, the other fisted unconsciously in the blanket she was wrapped up in, as though she thought someone might try to take it from her. The cat was awake, sitting at Lexa’s feet and washing herself in the lovely, thorough way Clarke appreciated in cats. Slowly, she reached down over the back of the couch and pulled the edge of the blanket a little higher up to Lexa’s chin, then smoothed her hand over it like she was tucking in someone much younger. She left her hand there for a moment, feeling the shape of Lexa’s shoulder just beneath the blanket, the light rise and fall of her breathing.

“Where are your folks, kiddo?” she asked softly, not wanting to wake her, “Do they know what’s happening to you? Do they care?”

It was a thought that made her deeply uncomfortable, that Lexa could be as bright and brave and kind as she so evidently was, and still be utterly alone and uncared for. She supposed it was an obvious side-effect of her own indulged privilege, perhaps even a vaguely disgusting impulse: to think that all one had to do to be loved was to deserve it.

She left Lexa to sleep and went through to the kitchen. The cat stretched languidly and leapt smoothly down from the couch, following Clarke and winding around her legs until she found a tin of cat food in the door of the refrigerator and fed her. Then she lit the stove and put Raven’s dented little aluminium percolator on, finding some pleasure in the simple domesticity of it. She was just pouring coffee into a mug when she heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel of the track outside, then someone scraping mud off their shoes on the edge of the bottom step. She tensed for a moment, holding the percolator poised above the mug, then the cottage door opened and she saw her mother at the threshold, in a familiar cardigan and rubber boots. There was a camera on a strap around her neck, the same old Canon camera Clarke recognised from her childhood.

“Morning,” said Abby, coming in but leaving the top half of the stable door open, “Could I get a cup of that?”

Clarke nodded and got a second mug out. She still remembered how her mother took her coffee, even though they hadn’t lived in the same house for nearly five years: black and unsugared. Clarke had always taken it sweet and milky like her father, and Abby had teased them both about only drinking coffee if it didn’t taste anything like coffee. It had irritated her very badly when she was a teenager, all of her mother’s amused, soft-voiced scolding. She had hated being laughed at more than almost anything, and had gotten into a habit of snarling facetious replies whenever she caught anything teasing in her mother’s tone. Now, she found she missed it.

“I sent you a message,” she said, holding out the mug.

“That’s why I came. She’s still here, I suppose?”

Clarke tilted her head towards the living room, “She’s asleep on the couch. You could have replied, you know.”

Abby took a seat at the table, putting her doctor’s bag down on the floor and cradling her coffee with both hands, “Sorry, not really my style. You remember.” She took a sip and winced a little when she burned her lips, “Still, it looks like I got here before the Sheriff’s Department.”

“Something tells me that’s not too difficult,” said Clarke, putting the milk away and coming to sit down next to her.

“Yes, well… You said you have a video clip?”

There was something in her voice that made Clarke feel defensive all at once and she put her mug down with unnecessary force, “He was beating her up, mom. I don’t know how you can sit there and be so calm about it. He had her on the ground and he kicked her, I saw it.”

Her mother met her fierce gaze unflinchingly, poker-faced, “And you have footage of it?”

“No, I… I didn’t start filming in time. I only have him pulling her off the ground. She looked bad, though. He brought her out in only her underwear.”

Abby made a small noise of distaste, although at what exactly Clarke wasn’t sure. She drank some more of her coffee, and then ran a tired hand over her brow, “Alright. I can do an examination, and document anything I find,” she tapped the camera around her neck, “It might take some convincing, though. Woods doesn’t trust doctors.”

“I’m not going to make her do anything she doesn’t want,” said Clarke, “She’s had enough of that already.”

Her mother gave a small shrug and drained her cup, getting up to take it to the sink, “I meant to talk to you yesterday, actually. I was held up, and I thought Raven would instead. Where is she? Her car’s not here.”

“She went into Polis last night. Should I be concerned that she’s not home yet?”

“No, she goes to town to drink sometimes, and she’s too sensible to drive back drunk. I think she spends the night with a mechanic she knows.”

There were a few muffled sounds from the living room, then Lexa was standing in the doorway, barefoot and sleep-tousled. A bruise had come up just under her right eye, and the bridge of her nose was faintly purple and sore-looking. Clarke was struck again by the sight of her in her clothes: softened and familiar. When Lexa saw her at the table, she smiled very shyly, almost reluctantly, and Clarke felt something akin to physical pain, but then she turned her head and saw Abby near the sink, and her smile faded in half a second.

“Hey,” said Clarke, pushing a chair out for her with the toe of her sneaker, “Come and sit down. I’ll pour you some coffee. You want some coffee?”

Lexa nodded vaguely, still watching Abby as Clarke got up and looked around for a clean mug. She sat on the edge of her chair, both elbows propped against the surface of the table, and when Clarke turned back to her from the stove, she caught her rubbing her eyes sleepily with the wrist of one hand. It was another of the sweet, surprising little gestures she seemed prone to when she thought no one was watching, and it amazed Clarke that something so small could invoke such strong emotion in her: a fish-hook yanking somewhere deep within her gut. She took the coffee from Clarke with a quiet “Thank you”, and blew lightly into the cup to cool it. Clarke had given it to her black, and found that she wasn’t surprised when Lexa didn’t ask for cream or sugar.

“How are you this morning, Alexandra?” asked Abby, sitting down opposite Lexa, fiddling nonchalantly with the strap of her camera. Lexa looked fixedly at the mug in front of her, then seemed to make a great effort to look up into Abby’s face, a slight, anxious frown creasing her brow.

“I’m well, Dr Griffin,” she said, “I don’t need medical assistance, thank you.”

She was impeccably polite, but her tone was flat and her body very stiff. Clarke looked at her, at the rigidly straight line of her back, from thin shoulders to narrow hips, and the faint tremble she thought she glimpsed for a moment in her long, delicate fingers, and knew instinctively that Lexa was more disturbed at this moment than she had ever seen her before. She was intensely uncomfortable for reasons Clarke wasn’t sure she was capable of understanding, but she wanted to try anyway.

“Lexa,” she said quietly, “What is it you don’t want?” She reached out and waited for Lexa to nod tersely before resting a hand over her own. The back of Lexa’s hand was cool, her knuckles hard and defined, the skin marred occasionally by the rough edges of scars Clarke could feel under her palm. Lexa glanced at her sidelong and gave her another of her awkward, serious smiles, “Nothing, I’m fine. I just don’t like check-ups.”

Clarke looked over at Abby, who was nodding slowly, in the particular way that Clarke knew other doctors sometimes envied her for: a kind of empathetic intuition. There was a recognition in her mother’s face, as if she had committed to this all at once and in the same moment had known how best to proceed.

“I think,” she said, “that the last time we tried this, you were in a lot of pain and I was too angry to help you properly.” She was speaking to Lexa directly now, almost as though they were alone together, sincerely and without any patronisation, “What I’d like is the chance to try again. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do before I do it and you can stop me whenever you want.” Abby turned to Clarke for a moment, “Won’t you make Lexa some toast? She’s missing breakfast.”

Clarke nodded and got up, pressing down very slightly on Lexa’s hand before taking her own away, and her mother deftly took her seat so that she was next to Lexa.

“I…” Lexa was looking grim and unsure, “Do I have to take my shirt off?”

“No, not if you don’t want to. Look, let’s start with your face,” she held up four fingers, “How many fingers?”

To Clarke’s surprise, Lexa laughed at that, quiet and uncertain, but startled into honest amusement, and Abby laughed too. Clarke looked away from them, down at the battery-operated toaster, which she had already learned was liable to jam if left unattended. She was glad of the excuse to hide her face and close her eyes briefly. She could still see Lexa, sitting on her bed with her hair freshly-washed and dishevelled, the moment before she had lent in and kissed her. It had startled her badly, because it was at that instant that the same impulse had rushed through her, one she had clamped down with a wave of self-hatred. she had despised herself, kneeling there in front of Lexa and feeling that kind of impulse, when it seemed like all anyone had ever done with Lexa was treat her like something inanimate, without feelings or rights or any kind of autonomy. Who was she to want Lexa like she had wanted her then, when she was hurt and cold and probably in shock? For a moment none of it had mattered, with their faces so close and the clean smell of soap and grass that clung to Lexa, then Clarke had tasted blood, very faintly, on Lexa’s lips and the moment was gone.

She could hear Lexa talking now, a little more relaxed, telling Abby haltingly about the fight. Her mother had got a notepad out and was jotting something down, listening intently, asking soft questions. She hadn’t touched Lexa yet, not even once, and the obvious care she was taking with her made Clarke feel a kind of love for her mother that she hadn’t felt since her father had died, maybe even since she was a little girl.

“Do you think it’s broken?” Abby asked, gesturing to Lexa’s nose, “It looks like you’ve broken it before, so I’ll trust your opinion.”

Lexa was starting to reply when they heard a car rumbling up the track towards the cottage, and she stopped speaking abruptly, twisting in her chair to look out of the kitchen window. Clarke, comfortably sure that the car was Raven’s, was still buttering the toast when there was the scrape of a chair being pushed back hurriedly and Lexa dived past her to be sick into the sink.

“The Sheriff’s Department is here,” said Abby from the table, “A cruiser just pulled up.”

Clarke went over to Lexa, who had stopped retching but was still lent over the sink, looking pale.

“Are you okay? If you’re feeling dizzy or nauseous, you might have a concussion.”

Lexa shook her head, embarrassed and apologetic, “No, it’s just… that’s the same car they arrested me in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you once again for your comments and kudos - they're a great motivation.


	12. Changeup Pitch

She could remember the smell of the car she had been put into that afternoon: sun-warmed vinyl seats, cigarette smoke and old coffee. Her boxing gloves had been stripped off at some point, put into a transparent plastic evidence bag, and her hands were cuffed behind her, still in their wraps. There was blood soaking the front of her singlet so that it clung to her chest and stomach, warm and stiffening, but she couldn’t think of how it had gotten there. She was sweaty and confused and terribly afraid, unable to do anything except slump back into the seat and breathe shallowly. Her hands ached dully, almost splinteringly, and there was an agonising pain in the back of her head. She hadn’t known where that pain had come from, until Anya had appeared at the police cruiser’s passenger window, speaking hurriedly to her as the Sheriff’s deputy opened the driver side door and slid in behind the wheel.

“Lex,” she had said, one hand pressed against the glass, smearing a little blood on the outside of the window, “Lex, listen to me. Don’t say a thing until you have a lawyer with you, okay? I’m serious, Lexa, not a single word.”

She had closed her eyes tightly, trying to focus on what was being said to her, but she was dizzy and sick.

“I think I’m concussed,” she had said, licking her peeling lips, “Anya? My head hurts.”

Anya had made an awful, guttural noise, and when Lexa managed to look up into her face she had seen that she was crying.

“Yeah,” she said and wiped clumsily at the tears dripping quietly down her cheeks, “I know, honey. Someone hit you in the head. They… they didn’t know how to make you stop.”

She had still been crying as the deputy slammed his door closed and started up the engine, and Lexa had kept eye contact with her even while the car pulled out of the school parking lot and onto the road. She had never seen Anya cry before.

Now she leaned over the sink in Raven’s cottage and tried very hard not to think about the police car outside. She had seen it pull up and stop, seen the slight dent in its passenger door, and known that it was the same car. Clarke was standing close beside her, too close, so that she could hear the soft sound of her breathing. She reached up with both hands and clapped the palms hard against her ears to muffle the noise. When Clarke touched her elbow gently, she flinched violently away from her, rubbed her face forcefully and turned on the faucet to wash away the bile she had spat into the sink, guilty for pushing Clarke away and wracked with feelings she did not know how to express.

There was a rap on the door, brusque and business-like, and before Dr Griffin or Clarke could get to it, the door was opened from the outside. Lexa glanced fleetingly at the deputy in the doorway, only long enough to see that he was the one she remembered: young and fair-haired, an overgrown boy scout with a gun at his hip. She had known him before he had arrested her. As a teenager he had hung around with the older kids in her neighbourhood, although his own family lived in a nicer part of town, and she had played baseball in the street with him once when she was about nine. He stood there on the threshold, his khaki uniform meticulously neat, and Lexa prayed that he didn’t recognise her. It had been three years since the arrest, and she had grown taller and thinner and rougher since then, but as soon as he saw her his expression changed to something utterly unreadable to her.

“I’ll be damned” he said, scraping his boots on the edge of the step and coming inside with his hat held politely in front of him, “It’s Alex Woods, isn’t it?”

She didn’t answer, and Clarke and her mother looked at her curiously, all three pairs of eyes heavy upon her: prying, oppressive, inescapable. After a moment of it, her resolve broke and she nodded curtly. Clarke seemed to sense her unease, and she moved towards the deputy with a friendly smile, subtly putting herself between him and Lexa, and thanked him for coming. He spoke pleasantly with her and allowed himself to be seated next to Dr Griffin at the kitchen table while Clarke poured him some coffee, but Lexa felt his gaze return to her always, his pale blue eyes sharp and calculating in his easy, smiling face. She did not trust him any more than she had when she was nine and he had been known for his changeup pitches. There was something so complacent, so entitled, about the way he took the coffee from Clarke, as if he had never been surprised by people giving him things, never once thought there might be an ulterior motive behind an act of kindness. She wondered if there had been a defining instant, a point of no return, when that instinct had been stripped from her and everything she did or had done to her became part of the vast, complicated economy of owing and being owed which plagued every interaction she had.

She was staring down at her own hands, grasping the edge of the kitchen counter she was leaning against, and when she realised the deputy was speaking to her she had to force her eyes away from them and up to a point just above his brow: not his eyes, never the eyes. He was in the middle of a sentence, his tone relaxed, even familiar, and he must have seen the blankness in her expression, because he looked a little amused and said, “I was telling you that I saw your dad recently, Alex.”

She felt herself go instinctively rigid, and she let go of the counter, one index finger moving to the cuticles of her thumb, to pick at them until she drew blood with her short, bitten-down fingernails.  Her face stayed open: a studied visage of absolute calm, and when she spoke she did not allow her voice to shake.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I ran into him at a barbeque last weekend. Poor guy, I think he’s awful lonely all by himself.”

Lexa thought this was probably true.  Her father was a difficult man in a plethora of ways, one of them being that he bitterly despised and distrusted most of the people he met, but simultaneously hated being alone. Any pleasure or self-worth he had was what he could exact painstakingly from dictating to the people under his control; it was why he had become a school teacher, why he had wept the day she was sentenced to no less than three years at a correctional facility. Prison had meant she was out of his grasp, not under her own authority, which would have been painful enough for him, but under the thumb of someone other than himself. He must be going quietly insane: alone in his ugly little house with no one to call him God.

“Yes,” she said, “Poor guy.”

The deputy took a drink of his coffee, moving it around in his mouth before he swallowed in a way that repulsed her. Her father had used to do something similar with his food, particularly when he was lecturing her at dinner, sitting across from her at their tiny kitchen table, drawing it out so that she was tense and miserable for the entire meal.

“He’s looking forward to having you home. You’re up for parole soon?”

She had known there was a twist here, a game he was playing, and now she had found it. Fuck the autism: she might not read a face well but she could plot out a train of thought like it was a car engine she was dismantling, and her educated guesses were prophetically good. Before he had parked outside, someone had told the deputy everything he needed to know: which inmate was claiming assault, how much of it had been caught on video, how best to get her to back down. It had been a noble thing for Clarke to call the police, the proper thing to do, but she did not know how deeply the Azgeda roots were sunk into the soil here, how absolutely they had ingrained themselves.

“That’s what I’m told,” she said, “I should be released in September.”

“I’m sorry,” said Clarke, and Lexa could see that she was struggling to understand the suggestive tide moving beneath the surface of the conversation, “This is all very lovely, but could we discuss the reason you’re here, Officer? I phoned your department about an assault.”

The deputy drank some more coffee, slow and deliberate, and Clarke folded her arms across her chest. Lexa was all too familiar with men like this: the posturing, the patronising politeness, the chess game of flattery and submission they expected the women around them to participate in. She found it both frustrating and admirable that Clarke had no patience for it and no intention of indulging him. When he was satisfied he had regained enough control, the deputy put his mug down and pulled a notepad and audio-recorder out of his belt, taking considered care not to bother looking at Clarke as he spoke to her.

“You may not find the subject of parole relevant to this case, Miss Griffin, but that is because you are not the inmate in question,” he glanced at Lexa, then back down at the notepad as he flipped it open, “Of course I will open a case if that is what the claimant wants. However, simply because I happen to know her family and have her best interests at heart, I also wish to advise Alex that a claim like this will complicate her chances of parole.”

Clarke’s mouth fell open just a little and when she spoke, Lexa could hear the barely repressed outrage in her voice, “A claim? You call this a claim? I have video evidence. My mother is preparing a doctor’s statement. What more do you want?”

The deputy sighed long-sufferingly, as if he was having to explain an adult concept to a very little child, “The issue is that your alleged assault victim,” he gestured at Lexa with his pen, “is not in the best position to be making accusations. There is very little evidence to suggest that the assault you reported last night was not provoked. In fact, there is a good deal of circumstantial evidence supporting the correctional officer’s need to defend himself. If that was the conclusion of a jury, Alex would face additional charges and her parole would almost certainly be revoked. She would serve a separate sentence at an adult facility.”

Lexa closed her eyes gently, leaning back into the edge of the counter until she felt it grind almost painfully into the small of her back through Clarke’s soft sweatshirt. She could feel the hot, swollen throb of the bruise on her left side, the bottom rib, where the Captain had kicked her. Ribs bruised so easily and spectacularly, an exploding firework of deep violet and burgundy that would fade to an ugly, greenish yellow over the next week. She knew what they would say now: that she had been in a fight, had tried to run away, had been caught, had resisted capture with violence. It was nearly impossible to disprove, and she was tired of resisting and not strong enough to listen to the things that would be dragged out in court: the boxing match, the blood, the videotape of it all.

“I don’t understand,” said Clarke, her voice cold and seething, “You’re saying that it’s more likely that a six foot man had to beat a teenage girl in self-defence, than that I witnessed an unprovoked assault on an inmate?”

Lexa wanted to stop her from pushing further, wanted to prevent the deputy from revealing his hand, which up to now he had played close to his chest, so that only she fully understood the implications of what he was saying. Clarke was riling him up, though, questioning his judgement and his morals, and she saw in the way his lips twitched that he was ready for the showdown.

“I’ll refer you to the circumstantial evidence, Miss Griffin, which I assume you are unaware of. The inmate involved is serving a three year sentence for aggravated battery. She was originally eligible for parole as of November last year, but,” he flipped through some of the pages in his notepad and began to read aloud, “During her incarceration, she has been involved in four incidences of violence, including the altercation last night. She has been placed in solitary confinement on eight occasions, and attempted escape three times. Does that sound like someone a jury is going to trust, Miss Griffin?”

Lexa had had enough. In a split second as the deputy had been speaking, she had made up her mind and decided what she had to do. She would not win the fight this way: it had taken a lot of boxing matches and three years in prison, but Anya’s advice had hit home. Brute endurance wouldn’t win anything for her, not the suicidal whirlwind of violence and numbness that had carried her through most of her life. It was time to fight cleverly, the way she had seen Anya fight when she had watched her at the college team trials, with patience and caution and a calculated fearlessness.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” she said, and ducked into the sitting room before any of them could stop her. She was almost at the bathroom door when a hand grabbed her by the wrist and she flung herself back and around to see Clarke behind her.

“Whoa,” said Clarke, letting go of her hastily, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I didn’t tell you to call the police. You didn’t think to ask me?”

She was angrier than she had thought a moment ago. In the back of her mind she knew she could not hate Clarke for doing it, perhaps even liked her better for the brave naivety of it, but she was so confused by her: the way she could still feel the echo of her fingers wrapped lightly around her wrist, and wanted them there again, wanted to be touched by her when she had never genuinely wanted to be touched by anyone before, not even Tia. She had permitted it, tolerated it, because Tia had wanted it and she had felt safe enough with her that it was only mildly uncomfortable. This was wildly different, and the strangeness of the feeling made her angry and a little afraid. Clarke seemed taken aback by the sudden, grating fury in her voice, but she did not flinch from it.

“I thought it was the best thing to do at the time,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, “I promise, Lexa, I didn’t know he’d be on their side.”

“Everyone is on their side,” Lexa said, gruff but not so angry anymore, only very, very tired, “They’re big, I’m little. They’re right, I’m wrong. That’s how it works.”

Something shifted in Clarke’s face and she looked at her with an emotion Lexa was unsure of. She could only hope it wasn’t pity.

“I know you don’t like being touched,” said Clarke, and Lexa could hear the softness of the concern in her voice, “But I would really like to hug you.”

They stood there in Raven’s cramped little sitting room, facing each other, for several long moments. Clarke said nothing else, made no move to approach her, and at last Lexa took a deep breath and stepped forward, slinging her arms around Clarke’s shoulders. For a second, Clarke stayed very still, then she pressed her hands lightly into the small of Lexa’s back and rested her chin on her shoulder. Lexa could feel the warmth of her body, the soft lines of it pressed against her, and squeezed her eyes closed to savour the nearness. When Clarke spoke, her lips were very close to her ear, but not even the tickle of her breath against the rim of her ear could distract Lexa from the pounding of her heart and the unconditional sincerity in Clarke’s voice: “It doesn’t have to work that way.”

She opened her eyes and pulled away again, dragging the back of her hand very quickly over her eyes, and nodded once, stiffly, when she saw that Clarke was studying her face carefully.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said, and even managed a faint, fleeting smile before she turned away and into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. She waited, alone amongst the cold white tiling and the drip of the leaky showerhead, until she heard Clarke’s footsteps move back into the kitchen. Then she stripped off Clarke’s sweatshirt and pants, folded them neatly, and left them on the edge of the bathtub. Dressed in only her grass-stained undershirt and boxer briefs, she stood on the closed lid of the toilet, opened the bathroom window and climbed out of it, dropping lightly onto the dewy grass below.

It was a Friday morning, and her platoon would be weeding the vegetable gardens behind the school kitchen. If she was quick and careful, she could get back to her barracks, change into uniform and join them, thereby avoiding a run-in with the Captain for as long as possible, although she knew that she could rely on the consequences of last night being ultimately inescapable. The Captain had been humiliated, and the Warden would be furious. As she ran across the sports field towards the school buildings, sticking to the very edge where the shadow of the treeline would obscure her moving shape, she tried to drown out the intrusive twinges of panic by focusing on the first three steps of her plan: find Octavia, contact Lincoln, get a hold of a cell phone with a video camera. Clarke’s fumbled attempt at video evidence had not been enough, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t shoot a film of her own. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to apologise for my general neglect when it comes to answering comments. I really appreciate all of them - thank you!


	13. Distant Thunder

She taught her morning classes, three of them, feeling ill and anxious. Her sick restlessness had been growing since she had realised that Lexa had climbed out of the bathroom window rather than return to the kitchen and the police. When Clarke had come back from the empty bathroom, holding the clothes Lexa had left behind, Abby had only sighed and leaned her elbows heavily on the table, looking blank and defeated. The sheriff’s deputy, who Clarke had begun to despise, had smiled infuriatingly, knowingly, and given a small shrug, still holding his cup of coffee in one hand. 

“Well,” he had said, taking a sip from his cup, “I guess she thought better of it after all. That’s teenagers for you, huh? They’re quick to make a fuss, quick to change their minds.”

Clarke had stared at him, looked him right in the eyes, and wanted to toss his hot coffee into his smug, comfortable face. Instead she had told him, absolutely calmly, that he could show himself out when he had finished his coffee, glanced at her mother to mean her too, and went to cry hot, ugly tears in the shower, where the water drowned out the sound. When she closed her eyes, palms pressed hard against the wet, white tiles of the wall in front of her, she could see only Lexa: curled up on the couch, sleepily endearing at the kitchen table. Her mind wandered unhappily: she thought again of her father, his smiling face, and about Finn’s warm body pressed against hers in the dark, the smell of him on her sheets. She had always found it difficult to draw close to people, to give herself over to caring for someone. It had taken a whole childhood to really love her father, and four long years to let Finn even begin to know her. It had exhausted her to think of trying again, until this sad, half-wild vagabond of a person had stumbled into her path. Instantly she had loved her, she could admit that now, in a way she had thought was impossible. It was a love like recognition: an urge to be near to her, to breathe the same air, to call her by her name. She had never felt anything quite like it before, and it seemed so intimately unfair that this phenomenon of feeling should be centred on someone so horrifically, complicatedly out of reach, so painful to love.

The girls in her classroom finished packing away the modelling clay she had given them to fool around with, and began to file out on their way to lunch, hanging up their aprons on the pegs near the door. Clarke, who had sat at her desk in silence for most of the morning, brooding and exhausted, watched the last girl leave and mustered a smile when she waved shyly at the door. She took a deep breath, the noise of it loud in the empty classroom, and got up stiffly, pulling on her jacket and slinging her satchel over one shoulder. The weather was beautiful, a day of full-bloomed summer, and as she stepped out of the dimly-lit building she had to lift a hand to protect her eyes from the sudden glare. A cool, clean breeze was sweeping gently past her from the sports field and the forest beyond it, smelling pleasantly of the trees. Everything seemed very still, despite the vague sway of branches at the treeline, and the girls playing soccer on the field.

As a child, she had been terrified of lightning. They had lived for a while in Florida, and she had hated the thunderstorms, gotten to sense when one was imminent: the thick, headachy silence before the sky broke open. She had used to hide in her parents’ closet if she was alone at home, pressed deep into the rack of her father’s button-down shirts where the boom of the thunder was muffled and she couldn’t see the hysterical, white flashes of lightning through the drawn curtains. It had been uncomfortable, crouching among her mother’s shoes, and the air had been musty and breath-warm, but as she walked back to the cottage along the edge of the sports field, Clarke yearned to crawl into it again and shut the door behind her. She could feel the same thundery unease in the air, and knew with a dull certainty that there was some great storm hunkered on the horizon.    

A car was parked outside the cottage that she didn’t recognise, a beaten-up blue truck, and as she drew nearer she saw that there was a woman smoking on the porch step who was definitely not Raven. She was tall and elegantly, carefully muscled, like a Greek athlete carved from marble. Her face, slightly lined for someone only five or six years older than Clarke herself, was without make-up: angular, cat-like, almost violently intelligent. She was smoking slowly, perhaps deep in thought, and Clarke thought the hand holding the cigarette might be trembling very lightly. She didn’t stand up when Clarke approached, but her dark, glittering eyes flicked up to look at her narrowly, and in that movement she saw a strange, half-formed resemblance to Lexa, not by blood but by mannerism. Clarke pushed the feeling aside, made an effort to stop seeing Lexa in everything, and nodded pleasantly at the woman, who did not return her tentative smile. Instead she took a long drag from her cigarette and breathed out a slow stream of smoke, still looking up at her.

“Clarke Griffin?” she asked, her voice hoarse but lovely, a mountain lion voice, “You’re the art teacher?”

“Yeah,” said Clarke, shifting the satchel strap on her shoulder, “And you are?”

“A friend of Raven’s.”

The woman’s gaze moved away from her disinterestedly, and Clarke realised that she was watching the girls playing soccer with a searching intensity, like she might be looking for someone in particular. As Clarke watched, she tilted her head to see past one of them, squinting up towards the school buildings. It disquieted her a little, to see this woman gazing out at children with her shrewd, predator’s eyes, but there was a distinct agitation in the way she held herself too, and it seemed to Clarke like the restiveness of affectionate anxiety. Despite her wife-beater and leather bomber jacket, the edge of a tattoo sleeve poking out from the cuff of her jacket, she reminded her bizarrely of a mother at a playground, trying to find her child among all the others. It was unexpectedly touching, and Clarke found herself hoping she would discover who she was looking for, just to see the look of triumphant relief that would come with it.

The cottage door opened and Raven stepped out onto the porch step, slightly behind her leonine friend. She looked tired and possibly hung-over, her black hair damp from a recent shower, and she was still buttoning on a fresh shirt. There was something about the tautness of the skin under her eyes, the twist of her mouth, which made Clarke think she might have been crying: an idea that particularly unsettled her. She leaned too unwarily on her bad leg as she came out and put a hand on the woman’s shoulder to steady herself. It was an easy, familiar gesture and the woman reached up absent-mindedly to lay her own hand over the back of Raven’s.

“Hi,” she said, her voice soft and a little raw, “I see you’ve met Anya. I doubt she’s been nice.”

Anya snorted and gave Clarke a fleeting, hostile look, “I’m not nice to prison people.”

“Clarke’s as much a prison person as I am.”

“I love you. I’m allowed to be biased.”

Raven glanced down at her, warm and smiling, maybe a little bemused, and saw the way she was staring out over the field at the soccer game. She sighed and tugged gently on her hand, “She’s not there, An. Her platoon has gym in the late afternoons. Let’s go inside and talk to Clarke, okay?”

Anya reluctantly allowed Raven to pull her to her feet and into the kitchen, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray on the table. She sat down, one long leg crossed suavely over the knee of the other, and dug a pouch of tobacco and rolling papers out of a jacket pocket, deft fingers fashioning a fresh cigarette with casual care. Raven sat down beside her and lit it for her when she had finished, although Clarke noticed she didn’t light one of her own. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t come home last night,” Raven said, sitting back in her chair and running a hand over her face, “Anya and I… we had a lot to talk about.”

“Why do you want to speak to me?” asked Clarke, who longed for her bed and did not want to have to recount the events of the night before until she had slept an uninterrupted six hours.

Raven looked quickly to Anya, who did not seem to want to meet her gaze, and back to Clarke, “It’s about Lexa.”

Of course it was. There was a part of Clarke, the little part that hung on to the kind of instincts that most people have as children: to be frustrated to the point of weeping, kicking, pounding a fist into the wall, that wanted to slam her palms against the table top, to lie down and go to sleep until everything was over. It was as she sat at the kitchen table, so dog-tired and miserable, that she realised she was having the briefest glimpse of what Lexa must be feeling all the time and for who knew how many years, perhaps a good deal of her life. The thought of it stilled her, and she sat silently for a moment, tracing the fingertips of one hand over the rough grain of the wooden table top, coming to a decision, deciding to involve herself, to love more unselfishly than she had before.

“Clarke?” asked Raven.

She looked up from the table, “Is it to do with what happened last night?”

A cold dread seeped into Raven’s expression, and Clarke’s stomach clenched, “Jesus, no. What happened?”

Clarke took her phone out of her satchel, found the video clip and handed it over to Raven, who put it flat on the table between her and Anya, and pressed play. The two of them watched it wordlessly, Raven with a small frown, Anya completely blank. Clarke hated the sound of her own voice, echoing shrilly from her phone, the flatness of her recorded anger. When the video ended with the scuffling sound of Clarke helping Lexa towards the cottage, the noise of them both breathing heavily, Anya reached out, still expressionless, and tapped the replay button on the screen. The video looped again, but Raven didn’t keep watching it. She covered her eyes with her hands very briefly, rubbed them hard, and then turned to watch Anya, who had leaned forward, her nose an inch from the phone screen, cigarette forgotten on the edge of the ashtray. As the video wound down to its end again, Anya’s finger hovered over the screen, but Raven took her hand gently in hers before she could press replay a second time. The touch seemed to wake something in Anya, and she jerked to her feet, out of Raven’s grasp, took a step towards the door, stopped, turned back, turned to the door again. Her face, her posture, radiated a confusing wash of emotions: pain, fury, shock, love.

“That… that _motherfucker_ ,” she said finally, strangely quiet, “I’ll fucking kill him.”

She made a much more decided move for the door and Raven leapt up as quickly as she could and half-tackled her around the waist, impressively effective for someone a good deal slighter than Anya and with only one capable leg. There was a small struggle, emotional and perfunctory, which Clarke found so intimate it was difficult to watch. Then Anya was standing with Raven’s arms still flung around her, as if all the energy had drained out of her.

“Clarke,” said Raven, “Close the door and bolt it. Anya, come and sit down. We’re going to talk about this like adults.”     

When Clarke had done what Raven asked, she turned back to the table and found Anya sitting with her head in her hands, and Raven rolling another cigarette for her: shaking out the tobacco, tonguing the paper, rolling it neatly. She practically forced it into Anya’s hand, smiling wryly, sadly, at Clarke as she joined them at the table.

“She shouldn’t smoke so much,” she said, “But she’s had a rough few hours.”

Clarke shrugged, looking curiously at Anya’s bowed head as she lit the cigarette disconsolately, “I guess we all have. You know Lexa?”

Anya took a quick draw, allowed her body to relax, and sat back a little in her chair, “I used to.”

“They grew up together,” Raven said, her tone tentative, like she was probing a bad cavity with the tip of her tongue, “They were step-sisters for a while.”

Anya swallowed hard and said, “I was a useless fucking sister.”

There was a thick silence, then Raven leant over to kiss her very lightly on the cheek, one hand moving to rest comfortingly on the back of her bowed neck. Her gaze shifted to Clarke and she seemed to feel the need to explain, though it took her a while to think about how best to phrase it.

“Anya and I have known each other since college,” she said, hesitantly, and Clarke saw Anya take Raven’s free hand and squeeze it, “That was after she and Lexa were separated. When we finished, we both decided to come back to Polis. My grandfather was dying and I wanted to be with him here, in the cottage. Anya had a job at the mechanic’s place in town.”

“I didn’t know where Lexa was,” Anya said, flicking the crumbling end of her cigarette into the ashtray, “The last time I saw her was when she was sixteen, at the county prison. They didn’t tell me when they moved her: I’m not blood-related.”

There was something guilty in Raven’s expression when she spoke again, and Clarke felt the hint of tension between the two of them.

“It took me a long time to realise who Lexa was… months and months. Even when I knew for sure… I… I didn’t tell Anya. Not until last night.”

Clarke didn’t ask why she had kept secrets from Anya, despite their obvious intimacy, the well-practiced softness of their interactions, the trust of a long, careful relationship. She guessed they had spoken about it most of the night, that it was responsible for the tear-rough hoarseness she thought she had heard in Raven’s voice when she had appeared at the door. There were things that belonged to them: deeply personal motivations that did not concern her.

“Yesterday evening I found out from one of the counsellors that Lexa’s going to be released on parole earlier than I thought,” Raven glanced at Anya, “That she’s going to be placed in her father’s custody.”

Anya flinched and let go of Raven’s hand, gripping the edge of the table, white-knuckled.

“That’s not a good thing?” asked Clarke, looking from one to the other. Neither replied immediately and the question hung awkwardly over them, so that Clarke wished she hadn’t asked it. Finally Anya picked up Clarke’s phone and gave it back to her, jabbing a finger at it once it was in Clarke’s hand, “You think that limp-dicked mama’s boy is any real danger to Lexa? She could break his jaw in half a second if that’s what she wanted to do, and one day she would, if she stayed here long enough. You know the one person she will never defend herself against? The same person she most needs to: her own fucking father.”

Raven cleared her throat and said, softly, “Lexa’s father is… abusive. Anya’s mother left him when he started hitting Anya.”

“No,” said Anya, her voice curt and full of bile, like she’d been asked to describe something rotten, “That’s too vanilla. My real dad was abusive, my mom’s first husband. Lexa’s father is a fucking sadist.”

Clarke closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, thought of the little scars on Lexa’s face, the resignation in her body as she had lain in a heap on the field, waiting for Roan to kick her again. In the moment of it, Clarke had thought it was a helpless, beaten vulnerability. Now she recognised the hopelessness of the repeated pattern in Lexa’s mind: that the only thing her life ever seemed to want to teach her was that her body would attract violence, always and inevitably, like moths to a bare light bulb in a dark room.

“That’s why we need your help,” Raven said, and when Clarke opened her eyes they were both looking at her, expectant, hopeful despite their unhappiness, “We need to get his custody revoked. Lexa’s an adult, and when her probation is over she won’t need to be under anyone’s custody, but we think…” she paused, reaching out to brush a piece of Anya’s hair behind her ear, “We think we’d like to adopt her anyway, if she’ll let us.”

The idea shocked Clarke for a moment; an unbelievable thing, or at least unlikely: that these women, not yet thirty, would think of signing themselves over to the strange little family they were proposing, that they would so seriously take up the commitment that was Lexa. Yet their expressions were perhaps some of the sincerest she had ever seen, and they were looking not at her but at each other: convinced, absolutely assured, that this was what they wanted. Clarke thought then about Lexa, about all the ways she had belonged to people, by abuse, by incarceration, by parole. There seemed no better thing to do for her than to give her a different kind of belonging, the kind that comes with undemanding, unasked-for love, with a self-constructed family.

“She’s had a lot of things taken from her,” Anya said, and Clarke thought that if she had been a different kind of person she might have been close to tears, “We want to give some of it back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this story has risen from the dead at an appropriate time. Apologies for the very, very long wait. I won’t give any long excuses, but (oddly appropriate for this story) an incident of police brutality I was involved in at a protest last year is being investigated by a human rights inquiry. It’s taken up a lot of my time and energy, please forgive me.
> 
> You can find me at laney-builds-cathedrals.tumblr.com


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